Which group developed the wimax standard?

IEEE 802 is a family of wireless standards that are designed for a variety of application. Trade off between data throughput, range, mobility and quality of service will condition the choice of technology. 

Close-in applications such as in your car or in your direct vicinity are considered Personal Area Networks and are based on the 802.15 standard. Examples are Bluetooth, Ultra-Wideband, and Zigbee.For larger coverage such as large rooms or an entire house, Local Area Networks (Wireless LAN) are based on the IEEE 802.11 standard. For larger areas such as entire campus or city up to 30 kilometers, the IEEE 802.16 standard is defined. These are considered Metropolitan Area Networks or Wide Area Networks. This is the standard that WiMAX is based on.

Background on IEEE 802.16 and WiMAX

The IEEE 802.16 group was formed in 1998 to develop an air-interface standard for wireless broadband. The group's initial focus was the development of a LOS-based point-to-multipoint wireless broadband system for operation in the 10GHz-66GHz millimeter wave band. The resulting standard-the original 802.16 standard, completed in December 2001-was based on a single-carrier physical (PHY) layer with a burst time division multiplexed (TDM) MAC layer.

The IEEE 802.16 group subsequently produced 802.16a, an amendment to the standard, to include NLOS applications in the 2GHz-11GHz band, using an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based physical layer. Additions to the MAC layer, such as support for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), were also included. Further revisions resulted in a new standard in 2004, called IEEE 802.16-2004, which replaced all prior versions and formed the basis for the first WiMAX solution. These early WiMAX solutions based on IEEE 802.16-2004 targeted fixed applications, and we will refer to these as fixed WiMAX. In December 2005, the IEEE group completed and approved IEEE 802.16e-2005, an amendment to the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard that added mobility support. The IEEE 802.16e-2005 forms the basis for the WiMAX solution for nomadic and mobile applications and is often referred to as mobile WiMAX.

The basic characteristics of the various IEEE 802.16 standards are summarized in Table 1. Note that these standards offer a variety of fundamentally different design options. For example, there are multiple physical-layer choices: a single-carrier-based physical layer called WirelessMAN-SCa, an OFDM-based physical layer called WirelessMAN-OFDM, and an OFDMAbased physical layer called Wireless-OFDMA. Similarly, there are multiple choices for MAC architecture, duplexing, frequency band of operation, etc. These standards were developed to suit a variety of applications and deployment scenarios, and hence offer a plethora of design choices for system developers. In fact, one could say that IEEE 802.16 is a collection of standards, not one single interoperable standard.

For practical reasons of interoperability, the scope of the standard needs to be reduced, and a smaller set of design choices for implementation need to be defined. The WiMAX Forum does this by defining a limited number of system profiles and certification profiles. A system profile defines the subset of mandatory and optional physical and MAC-layer features selected by the WiMAX Forum from the IEEE 802.16-2004 or IEEE 802.16e-2005 standard. It should be noted that the mandatory and optional status of a particular feature within a WiMAX system profile may be different from what it is in the original IEEE standard. Currently, the WiMAX Forum has two different system profiles: one based on IEEE 802.16-2004, OFDM PHY, called the fixed system profile; the other one based on IEEE 802.16e-2005 scalable OFDMA PHY, called the mobility system profile. A certification profile is defined as a particular instantiation of a system profile where the operating frequency, channel bandwidth, and duplexing mode are also specified. WiMAX equipment are certified for interoperability against a particular certification profile.

The WiMAX Forum has thus far defined five fixed certification profiles and fourteen mobility certification profiles (see Table 2). To date, there are two fixed WiMAX profiles against which equipment have been certified. These are 3.5GHz systems operating over a 3.5MHz channel, using the fixed system profile based on the IEEE 802.16-2004 OFDM physical layer with a point-to-multipoint MAC. One of the profiles uses frequency division duplexing (FDD), and the other uses time division duplexing (TDD).

Table 1 Basic Data on IEEE 802.16 Standards

Table 2 Fixed and Mobile WiMAX Initial Certification Profiles 

Which one is the standard for WiMAX?

When was WiMAX introduced?

What is the WiMAX technology?

What is an IEEE 802.16 network?