Affiliations: Siemens Corporate Technology, Information and
Communication IC 2, Munich, Germany | University of Rome "Sapienza", Roma, Italy | Nextworks, Pisa, Italy | Portugal Telecom Inovação, Aveiro,
Portugal | University of Coimbra, DEI, Pinhal de Marrocos, Polo
II, Coimbra, Portugal
Note: [] Corresponding author: Thomas Michael Bohnert, Siemens Corporate
Technology, Information and Communication IC 2, Otto-Hahn-Ring 6, 81739 Munich,
Germany. E-mail: tmb@nginet.de
Abstract: The IEEE 802.16 standard provides a specification for a fixed and
mobile broadband wireless access system, offering high data rate transmission
of multimedia services with different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements
through the air interface. The WiMAX Forum, going beyond the air interface,
defined an end-to-end WiMAX network architecture, based on an all-IP platform
in order to complete the standards required for a commercial rollout of WiMAX
as broadband wireless access solution. As the WiMAX network architecture is
only a functional specification, this paper focuses on an innovative solution
for an end-to-end WiMAX network architecture offering in compliance with the
WiMAX Forum specification. To our best knowledge, this is the first WiMAX
architecture built by a research consortium globally and was performed within
the framework of the European IST project WEIRD (WiMAX Extension to Isolated
Research Data networks). One of the principal features of our architecture is
support for end-to-end QoS achieved by the integration of resource control in
the WiMAX wireless link and the resource management in the wired domains in the
network core. In this paper we present the architectural design of these QoS
features in the overall WiMAX all-IP framework and their functional as well as
performance evaluation. The presented results can safely be considered as
unique and timely for any WiMAX system integrator.
