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Mobile WiMAX was successfully adopted by ITU as one of the IMT-2000 technologies in November 2007. Since then mobile WiMAX (a.k.a. IP-OFDMA) has officially become a major global cellular wireless standard along with 3GPP UMTS/HSPA and 3GPP2 CDMA/EVDO. Mobile WiMAX is an OFDM-based technology available for deployment today, and new WIMAX devices come to market at much reduced cost than that of current 3G solutions. Currently over 260 service providers are deploying fixed, portable and mobile WiMAX networks in 110 countries. This article provides an overview of the mobile WiMAX system and its performance under various configurations, channel conditions, and types of data traffic. Furthermore, the article provides an overview of mobile WiMAX evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile WiMAX is a fast growing broadband access technology that enables low-cost mobile Internet applications, and realizes the convergence of mobile and fixed broadband access in a single air interface and network architecture. Mobile WiMAX combines OFDMA and advanced MIMO schemes along with flexible bandwidth and fast link adaptation, creating a highly efficient air interface that exceeds the capacity of existing and evolving 3G radio access networks. WiMAX networks, built on all-IP network architecture for plug and play network deployments, can support a mix of different usage and service models. While some consider mobile WiMAX as a candidate for the fourth generation of mobile networks, others view it as the first generation of mobile Internet technologies emerging from a wider ecosystem targeting to extend the success of WiFi over wide area networks supporting mobility. This article provides a high-level overview of mobile WiMAX technology and its evolution roadmap from both radio and network perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimedia stream service provided by broadband wireless networks has emerged as an important technology and has attracted much attention recently. An all-IP network architecture with reliable high-throughput air interface makes orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA)-based mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (mobile WiMAX) a viable technology for wireless multimedia services, such as voice over IP (VoIP), mobile TV, and so on. One of the main features in a WiMAX MAC layer is that it can provide differentiated services among different traffic categories with individual QoS requirements. In this article, we first give an overview of the key aspects of WiMAX and describe multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) architecture of the 3GPP. Then, we propose a multicast and broadcast service (MBS) architecture for WiMAX that is based on MBMS. Moreover, we enhance the MBS architecture for mobile WiMAX to overcome the shortcoming of limited video broadcast performance over the baseline MBS model. We also give examples to demonstrate that the proposed architecture can support better mobility and offer higher power efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiuser diversity techniques are used in multicarrier data systems to enhance downlink cell throughput. This requires downlink channel information from the users that is opportunistically used by a base station to send data to the users with good channel condition. Channel feedback from the user to the base station incurs high overhead especially when many users are in the cell and each user needs to report channel information over multiple channels, as in OFDMA systems. To reduce the quantity of feedback information without significant throughput degradation, a practical strategy is to deliver feedback on a partial set of channels with the best channel quality. We call it best feedback, and this reporting scheme carried out for best four or five among 24 channels has been already adopted in the IEEE 802.16e standard. Considering real feedback conditions, we investigate the performance of a best feedback scheme and derive the optimal number of channels for which information needs to be fed back to keep the throughput gap (compared to a full feedback scheme) within a target margin. From the optimal condition, we propose an adaptive best feedback algorithm, where the number of reported channels is adjusted to adapt to the number of users in the cell. We also propose an adjusted periodic feedback algorithm, where users are divided into groups and scheduling is carried out group by group, so a user can report feedback information when his group is scheduled, thereby reducing the frequency of feedback transmission. To support differentiated performance, we further propose heterogeneous feedback algorithms where users are divided into heterogeneous groups, each with a different group size or a different feedback period. Numerical results validate our analysis and provide meaningful insights into the design of various channel feedback schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing demands for advanced mobile multimedia let the wireless mobile Internet access be developed rapidly. The Mobile WiMAX (IEEE 802.16e) is capable of providing high data rate and flexible Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms. However, one of killer applications, mobile streaming video service from mobile station (MS) to fixed internet network can't still avoid a traditional QoS degradation problem caused by unreliable mobile channel environment. The previous researches show that streaming video service based on downward cross-layer design over OFDMA channel has improved robust features to channel errors, but requires modifications of the existing schedulers, packet ordering, and channel allocation strategies in base station (BS). Now, our goal is that we develop a high error resilient and robust method to channel errors on the OFDMA mobile video device without the modification of conventional functions in WiMAX BS. In this paper, we introduce OFDMA channel aware error resilient video coding method using an upward cross-layer design. Through the extensive simulation results, we prove that the proposed channel-aware intra-refresh coding can recover video damages more efficiently than traditional intra-refresh one over OFDMA channel environment. This error resilience feature can be adapted to all types of streaming video server devices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]