2007 NTUEE Mobile Communications

Introduction to Mobile WiMAX

Kwang-Cheng Chen, National Taiwan University

Abstract We briefly introduce the origin and development of Mobile WiMAX in this chapter. Then, we orient the technology used in mobile WiMAX in physical transmission and medium access control, along with recent progress related to the IEEE 802.16 and mobile WiMAX. 1 IEEE 802.16 Before talking about WiMAX, we must start from the IEEE 802.16. IEEE 802 defines international standards (more precisely, to be recognized by the ISO later) for local area networks (LAN) and metropolitan area networks (MAN), such as IEEE 802.3 well known as Ethernet. IEEE 802 projects generally consider physical layer transmission (PHY) and medium access control (MAC), while left network layer and above to other international standards such ISO. Since 1990, there are a few wireless standards in IEEE Project 802: IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs (WLAN) IEEE 802.15 wireless personal area networks (WPAN) IEEE 802.16 wireless metropolitan area networks (WMAN) IEEE 802.20 and more others With popular WiFi applications (i.e. wireless LANs) especially after hot-spot deployment, more reliable wireless broadband technology for Internet access attracts great interests. The concept for wireless metropolitan area networks (WMAN) has therefore been introduced in recent years. Among many efforts, IEEE 802.16 standard defining fixed broadband wireless (FBW) is widely considered as a new generation technology to replace past wireless local loop (WLL) in telecommunications, and to deliver performance comparable to traditional cable, T1, xDSL, etc. The advantages of IEEE 802.16 include Quick deployment, even in those areas hard for wired infrastructure to reach Ability to overcome physical limitation of traditional wired infrastructure Reasonable installation cost to support high rate access In other words, standardized FBW can support flexible, cost-effective, broadband access services in a wide range of devices. WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave

2007 NTUEE Mobile Communications Access) Forum is a non-profit corporation formed by equipment and component suppliers to promote the adoption of IEEE 802.16 compliant equipment by operators of broadband wireless access systems, which is comparable to WiFi Alliance in promoting IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. WiMAX is establishing System Profiles for all compliant equipment, which can also address regulatory spectrum constraints faces by operators in different geographical regions. WiMAX forum also develops higher-layer specifications to match IEEE 802.16. In the mean time, WiMAX defining conformance tests in conjunction with interoperability enables service providers to choose multiple vendors. WiMAX works with ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) to develop for the HIPERMAN standard. In April 2002, IEEE 802.16 was published for 10-66G Hz operations, while line-of-sight transmission is considered as primary application. To promote immediate wider applications, IEEE 802.16a was published in January 2003, which aims at 2-11G Hz operations for nonline-of-sight performance. Fixed broadband wireless (FBW) access applications based on point-to-multipoint network topology primarily include Cellular (or Fixed-Network) backhaul Broadband on-demand Residential broadband Underserved areas services Nomadic wireless services As a consequence, FBW (later refined as Broadband Wireless Access, BWA, for the IEEE 802.16) systems and networks shall support High throughput High degree of scalability Quality-of-service (QoS) capability High degree of security Excellent radio coverage IEEE 802.16 Wireless MAN has a connection-oriented MAC and PHY is based on non-lineof-sight radio operation in 2-11 GHz. For licensed bands, channel bandwidth shall be limited to the regulatory provisioned bandwidth divided by any power of 2, no less than 1.25M Hz. Three technologies have been defined: Single carrier (SC) Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) The communication of frame-based IEEE 802.16 is based on the fundamental concept by defining burst profiles in each BS-SS communication link. IEEE 802.16 has a revision published in October 2004, which is known as IEEE 802.162004. The mobile version of IEEE 802.16 has been developed in the IEEE 802.16e (official 2

2007 NTUEE Mobile Communications name as Physical and Medium Access Control Layers for Combined Fixed and Mobile Operation in Licensed Bands), which is commonly known as Mobile WiMAX, especially considering its OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access) PHY. Such a mobile enhancement of IEEE 802.16e are primarily specified for licensed bands Korean WiBro provides mobile services based on IEEE 802.16-2004 and IEEE 802.16e. In ITU-R May 2007 meeting in Japan, mobile WiMAX has been recommended as OFDMA TDD WMAN (though still subject to further formal approval), and thus leaving 50M Hz bandwidth internationally available at 2.57-2.62 GHz from 3G TDD spectrum, on per nation basis. Since December 2006, IEEE 802.16m has started as a new amendment project to study the IEEE 802.16 WirelessMAN-OFDMA specification to provide an advanced air interface for operation in licensed bands, and to meet the cellular layer requirements for IMT-Advanced toward next generation mobile networks, of course, with continuing support for legacy WirelessMAN-OFDMA equipment and devices. The target speed for IEEE 802.16m is 100M bps, with supporting high mobility, so that it may serve as a candidate of IMTAdvanced. Consequently, 3G LTE (long-term evolution) from 3GPP, UMB (ultra mobile broadband) from 3GPP2, and IEEE 802.16e and 802.16m, are all adopting OFDMA based technology. 1.2 IEEE 802.16 MAC IEEE 802.16 Medium Access Control (MAC), while IEEE 802.16e MAC generally follows, has a network topology of point to multi-point, with support to mesh network topology. Its backhaul can be either ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) or packet-based (such as IP networks). From the reference model as illustrated in the Figure 1.1, there are three sublayers in the MAC: Service Specific Convergence Sub-layer (CS): providing any transformation or mapping of external network data through CS SAP (CS service access point). MAC Common Part Sub-layer (MAC CPS): classifying external network service data units (SDUs) and associating these SDUs to proper MAC service flow and Connection Identifier (CID). Multiple CS specifications are provided for interfacing with various protocols. Privacy (or Security) Sub-layer: supporting authentication, secure key exchange, and encryption. Different from typical MACs using random access techniques in the IEEE 802, IEEE 802.16 MAC is connection oriented, and similar to time division multiple access (TDMA). Once a subscriber station (SS) enters the network, it creates one or more connections to communicate with base station (BS). It also performs link adaptation and automatic repeat request (ARQ) functions to maintain target bit error rate. To further support multimedia traffic, IEEE 802.16 MAC may have to execute usage of radio resources, and provide quality-of-service (QoS) differentiation in services, which are not considered as typical MAC functions. To support OFDMA PHY, the MAC layer is responsible for assigning frames into proper zones and exchanging this structure information to the SSs in the DL and UL maps. Transmit diversity and adaptive antenna system (AAS), as well as MIMO zone, are included. 3

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Scope of standard CS SAP
Network Management System

Service Specific Convergence Sublayer (CS)

MAC

Management Entity Service Specific Convergence Sublayer Management Entity MAC Common Part Sublayer Privacy Sublayer Management Entity PHY Layer Management Plane

MAC SAP MAC Common Part Sublayer (MAC CPS) Privacy Sublayer PHY SAP

PHY

Physical Layer (PHY) Date/Control Plane

Figure 1.1 Reference Model of IEEE 802.16 The IEEE 802.16e MAC provides QoS differentiation for different types of applications, and defines 4 types of services: Unsolicited Grant Services (UGS): UGS is designated for constant bit rate (CBR) services, such as T1/E1 emulation and VoIP without silence suppression. Real-Time Polling Services (rtPS): rtPS is designated for real-time services that generate variable size of data packets on a periodic basis, such as MPEG video and VoIP with silence suppression. Non-Real-Time Polling Services (nrtPS): nrtPS is designated for non-realtime services that require variable size data grant burst types on a regular basis. Best Effort Services (BE): It counts typical data traffic such as Internet web browsing and ftp file transfer. Closer to the concept of cellular layer-2/3, IEEE 802.16 MAC has the radio link control (RLC) to control PHY transition from one burst profile to another, in addition to traditional power control and ranging. Another important sub-layer in the IEEE 802.16 MAC is security sub-layer, and an improved version has been developed for the IEEE 802.16e. Privacy and Key Management Protocol version 2 (PMKv2) is the basis of mobile WiMAX security. Device and user authentication adopts IETF EAP protocol. The traffic encryption follows the IEEE 802.11i using AES-CCM to protect traffic data. The keys used for deriving the ciphertext are generated from the EAP authentication. To avoid further attacks and hostile analysis, a periodic key (TEK) refreshing mechanism enables improved protection. A 3-way handshake scheme in mobile WiMAX optimizes the re-authentication mechanism for fast handover by preventing man-in-the-middle-attacks.

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1.3 IEEE 802.16e Mobile WiMAX Mobile WiMAX is generally considered as the IEEE 802.16e-2005 adopting OFDMA PHY. In this book, we shall describe recent advances in mobile WiMAX from technology to services and applications. Prior to these chapters, we shall briefly introduce Mobile WiMAX in this section. The IEEE 802.16e-2005 supports both time division duplexing (TDD) and frequency division duplexing (FDD) modes. However, the initial release of mobile WiMAX profiles only considers the TDD mode of operation by the following reasons: It enables dynamic allocation of downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) radio resources to effectively support asymmetric DL/UL traffic that is common in Internet applications. The allocation of radio resources in DL and UL is determined by the DL/UL switching point(s). Both DL and UL are in the same frequency channel to yield better channel reciprocity and to better support link adaptation, multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) techniques, and closed-loop advanced antenna technique such as beam-forming. Single frequency channel in DL and UL can provide more flexibility for spectrum allocation. To further alleviate spectrum allocation efforts, mobile WiMAX adopts simple frequency reuse schemes by reusing 1 and 3 with PUSC.

F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1 F1

F1= B MHz S1=SubCH {0, N-1} S2=SubCH {N, 2N-1} S3=SubCH {2N, 3N-1}

F1,S1 F1,S3 F1,S2 F1,S1 F1,S1 F1,S3 F1,S3 F1,S2 F1,S2 F1,S1 F1,S3 F1,S2 F1,S1 F1,S1 F1,S3 F1,S3 F1,S2 F1,S2 F1,S1 F1,S3 F1,S2

Reuse 1x3x1

Reuse 1x3x3

Figure 1.2 Frequency Reuse Schemes (a) 131 (b) 133 As pointed in [3], time division DL/UL in multiple-cell wireless networks can create updown collisions (or interference) to result in performance loss. Fractional frequency reuse

2007 NTUEE Mobile Communications (FFR) as Figure 1.3 can be applied by utilizing frequency reuse 131 near the center and frequency reuse 133 near the cell edges. There is no need for frequency planning and is very flexible to configure the networks. Frequency reuse factor 1 at the center of the cell to maximize the network spectral efficiency, while higher reuse factor at cell edges to alleviate (co-channel) interference.

F2 F F1 F F F3 F1 F2 F F1 F F F3

1X3X1 Reuse

F2 F F F F3

1X3X3 Reuse F1: F,S1 F2: F,S2 F3: F,S3

F=F1+F2+F3

Figure 1.3 Fractional Frequency Reuse When we design a mobile WiMAX system, we usually consider the wide-sense stationary uncorrelated scattering (WSSUS) to stochastically model the time-varying fading wireless channels in time and frequency domains. Two main factors from this model are used in developing the system parameters: Doppler spread and thus coherence time of the channel, and multipath delay spread and thus coherence bandwidth. Stanford University Interim (SUI) channel models are widely accepted in study of WiMAX systems. A very special feature in (mobile) WiMAX is ranging while SS at initial entry and also periodically in normal operation, in which the mobile subscriber station (MS) acquires frequency, time, and power adjustments, so that all MS transmissions can align with the UL sub-frame received by the base station (BS). Ranging process proceeds via MS transmitting a signal and BS responding with required adjustments, which is a closed loop control process critical to OFDMA communications in (mobile) WiMAX. Ranging happens in 3 types: initial/handoff ranging, periodic ranging, and BW request ranging. Mobile WiMAX OFDMA PHY adopts scalable OFDMA with 1.252n MHz bandwidth, n=0, 1, 2, 3, 4, at fixed sub-carrier spacing. There are 3 types of OFDMA sub-carriers: Data sub-carriers for data transmission Pilot sub-carriers for estimation and synchronization purposes Null sub-carriers for guard band and DC carriers, without transmission at all

2007 NTUEE Mobile Communications The pilot sub-carrier allocation can be performed in different modes. For DL Fully Used Subchannelization (FUSC), the pilot tones (or sub-carriers) are allocated first and then the remaining sub-carriers are arranged for data sub-channels. For DL Partially Used Subchannelization (PUSC) and all UL modes, the set of all used sub-carriers (pilot and data) is partitioned into sub-channels, and then pilot sub-carrier(s) are allocated within each subchannel. Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) is adopted by using QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM (optional in UL) as modulation, and convolutional codes (mandatory), turbo codes, lowdensity parity check codes for forward error correcting codes (FEC). Of most interests, space-time codes (STC) and spatial multiplexing (SM) are used to enhance PHY transmission speed and reception quality of signals from mobile stations. STC is originated from pioneer work of transmit diversity coding by S. Alamouti [9], and Figure 1.4 depicts the realization of closed-loop STC for mobile WiMAX, and Alamouti code as shown. There are 3 kinds of STC in the IEEE 802.16e OFDMA by using 2 or 3 antennas, while Alamouti code is one of them.

h0

n0
+ STC Combining

[s0 s1 ]

STC Coder

s0 s * s1 s0
* 1

h0 h2

h h1 1 h3 h n1 2 h3
+

[s0 s1 ]

Matrix Book

Channel Estimator

h0 h2

h1 h3

Feedback Channel

Figure 1.4 Closed-Loop Space Time Coding (Alamouti codes as an example) In addition to STC, spatial multiplexing can be further used, which is depicted in Figure 1.5. Spatial multiplexing transmits data streams via different spatial domains (typically multiple antennas). STC and spatial multiplexing can form the foundation of IEEE 802.16e MIMO processing. BS can send control messages to indicate subsequent allocation shall use certain permutation with a specific transmit diversity mode, and to describe DL allocations assigned to MIMO enabled SSs by defining one of the 3 STC matrices.

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One Sub-carrier

n0
Data Stream 1 + Data Stream 1 D E C O Data Stream 2 D E R Data Stream 3

n1
Data Stream 2 +

n2
Data Stream 3 +

Channel Estimator

Figure 1.5 Spatial Multiplexing To support STC and spatial multiplexing, pilots for multiple transmission antennas should be disjunct to avoid inter-stream interference. It is worth noting that OFDM particularly fits MIMO and adaptive antenna techniques, comparing with CDMA and single carrier transmission. 1.4 Mobile WiMAX End-to-End Network Architecture IEEE 802.16e only defines PHY and MAC. However, in light of the needs of interfaces at higher layers to allow multi-vendor supply as typical wireless communication standards, WiMAX Forum has working groups beyond the IEEE 802.16. The mobile WiMAX End-toEnd Network Architecture is developed on an all-IP platform with all packet technology and without any legacy circuit telephony. Figure 1.6 depicts an IP-based WiMAX network architecture, which consists of 3 major parts: user terminals (i.e. subscriber/mobile stations), access service network (ASN), and connectivity service network (CSN). ASN defines a logical boundary to describe aggregation of functional entities and corresponding message flows associated with the access services. Connectivity service network (CSN) represents a set of network functions providing IP connectivity services to WiMAX subscribers. A CSN may compromise network elements such as AAA proxy and servers, routers, user database, and internetworking gateway. The end-to-end WiMAX network architecture extensively supports mobility and handover, which includes Vertical or inter-technology handovers under multi-mode operation IPv4 and IPv6 based mobility management Roaming between network service providers (NSPs) 8

2007 NTUEE Mobile Communications Seamless handover up to vehicular speed satisfying bounds of service disruptions

Network Interoperability Interfaces Mobile WiMAX Terminal Portable WiMAX Terminal Fixed WiMAX Terminal User Terminals Mobile WiMAX Base Station Access Service Network Gateway (ASN-GW) Service Provider IP Based Core Networks AAA Server MIP HA Billing Support System Content Services IMS Operation Support Systems

Access Service Network

Connectivity Service Network

Air Interface

Roaming Interface

Figure 1.6 WiMAX Network IP-Based Architecture WiMAX network architecture surely has provisions to support QoS via differentiated levels of QoS, admission control, bandwidth management, and other appropriate policies. References:
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] C. Eklund, R.B. Marks, K.L. Stanwood, S. Wang, IEEE Standard 802.16: A Technical Overview of the Wireless MAN Air Interface for Broadband Wireless Access, IEEE Communications Magazine, June 2002. INTEL Technology Journal, special issue on WiMAX, Vol. 8, No. 3, 2004. K.C. Chen, Medium Access Control of Wireless Local Area Networks for Mobile Computing, IEEE Networks, 1994. X. Fu, Y. Li, H. Minn, A New Ranging Method for OFDMA Systems, IEEE Tr. On Wireless Communications, vol. 6, no. 2, Feb. 2007. C. Cicconetti, et al., Quality of Service Support in IEEE 802.16 Networks, IEEE Network, March/April, 2006. J. Wang, M. Venkatachalam, Y. Fang, System Architecture and Cross-Layer Optimization of Video Broadcast over WiMAX, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 25, No. 4, May 2007. Q. Ni, et al., Investigation of Bandwidth Request Mechanisms under Point-to-Multipoint Mode of WiMAX Networks, IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2007. K. Lu, Y. Qian, H-H. Chen, A Secure and Service-Oriented Network Control Framework for WiMAX Networks, IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2007. S. Alamouti, Simple Transmit Diversity Technique for Wireless Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Vol. 16, No. 8, October 1998.