Improving throughput in WiMAX communication at vehicular speeds

摘要

WiMAX technology has emerged as an exciting technology for next generation broadband wireless network with promises to offer high throughput and long coverage. WiMAX, however, has yet to prove its merits when the wireless nodes are not fixed and move at high vehicular speeds. Recent studies suggest that WiMAX offers limited throughput when a mobile node travels at vehicular speeds. Multipath fading causes high bit error rates at the receiver and is considered the main reason behind low throughput at high vehicular speeds. Bit error rates and maximum packet size govern the packet error rates, and error recovery for higher number of corrupted packets is not an attractive option for many real-time applications with tight delay and jitter constraints. In this paper, we present a mathematical model for estimating bit error rates in WiMAX communication at vehicular speeds. The estimated bit error probability is taken into account for proactively computing an optimum packet size that offers the best chance of achieving improved throughput. We further propose a model that can be used to increase the utility of real-time wireless applications (e.g., video surveillance systems in public train) based on the knowledge of estimated transmission rates. We simulated the proposed and other standard schemes for a centralized video surveillance system in a public train where the train moves at high speeds and sends real-time video data to a central control room through wireless channels. The results show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher throughput, lower jitter and higher utility gain compared to the standard schemes.