Abstract:
With the growing importance of online connectivity to business and personal communications, there has been a substantial increase in demand for access to the broadband Internet. Users expect voice and data services to be available anywhere and at anytime. Users are not confined to city regions and there is a growing demand to rapidly roll out high-speed service access to remote and rural areas. Delivery of fixed network resources via fibre cables to remote and rural subscribers are expensive and alternative approaches using fixed wireless broadband networks are now emerging as an attractive and feasible option. IEEE802.16 standard for wireless broadband access has been proposed, which promises to provide a solution to the above problem.
Network optimisation of IEEE802.16 family, popularly known as WiMax, can be done in two phases. Firstly by looking into a single base station coverage area (a cell) and ways to improve the performance of that cell. Secondly, integrating multiple cells and study the scalability of such a network to replace an existing PSTN network.
Although WiMax can support voice, video and high-speed data communication in a single connection, there is a trade off between voice, video and data connectivity, quality of service, mobility and area of coverage. Therefore, when analysing network performance in a single cell, the ratio of voice and video to data traffic affects the quality of service greatly. Data rate is also dependant on cell coverage area. Therefore when planning a network, these constrains needs to be taken into consideration.
When scalability is taken into consideration, WiMax has the potential to replace an existing public telephony network infrastructure with a network, which is capable of providing simultaneous telephony, high-speed data and video services to the users. But, cost-effectiveness of such a network will depend on several parameters; most important ones are: user density, bandwidth consumption per user, environmental factors that affect cell coverage and configuration. In other words, where are the network capacity limits for a given WiMax network when it comes to replacing multiple existing networks that provide voice, video and high-speed data connectivity with guaranteed quality of service?
This research aims to answer these questions by identifying capacity thresholds of a WiMax network through the developed simulation models and analytical methods.
About the speaker:
In 2003, I graduated from RMIT with Bachelor of Engineering (Communication) and Bachelor of Applied Science (Computer Science) - Double Degree Program. In March 2004 I enroled in Masters by Research at Centre for Advance Technology in Telecommunication (CATT), RMIT University. But after my supervisor left RMIT, I decided to join Monash.
I joined CTIE for Masters by Research in March 2005. During my research at RMIT, I was exploring various wireless technologies and decided to persue my research on WiMax and published a white paper, "WiMax – The Next Generation of Wireless Communication?" (ISBN: 978-1-931695-30-x), in the "Broadband Wireless and WiMAX" report by IEC (International Engineering Consortium). Since joining CTIE, I have been working on networking issues of WiMax and the possiblities of replacing existing PSTN and Internet wired networks with WiMax.
