Standard & Beyond

Progressing at a rapid pace, the WiMAX Forum has been working diligently to produce a set of standards that revolutionizes the potential for fixed and mobile broadband access. Standards establish a baseline for service capacity, coverage, and other operational features. With its years of experience in OFDM systems, Alvarion has engineered its BreezeMAX system beyond the WiMAX standard. As Alvarion uses the standards as a foundation, the BreezeMAX system maintains its ability to be integrated and interoperable with systems from other WiMAX vendors.

Coverage is Key
Coverage is perhaps the most important indicator of a quality broadband wireless access system and a primary influence on cost - as good coverage performance requires fewer base stations. The extent of a BWA system's coverage is largely a factor of radio sensitivity, the specifications of which have been determined by the WiMAX and the IEEE 802.16-2004 standards. Alvarion's BreezeMAX system radio sensitivity, however, improves on this standard outperforming the specification by 8-10dBm as illustrated in the graph. Typically, 6dBm improvement in the link budget results in double the coverage.

Radio-Planning Translates to Profits
System coverage performance has a tremendous influence on cost. In the commercial example below, an area with the dimensions of 130km x 96 km is delineated. Compare the BreezeMAX system with typical competition base station requirements for this scenario.

The results favor BreezeMAX by far : BreezeMAX provides 99.99% coverage with only 11 base stations in comparison with typical competition base station requiring 28 base stations for the same coverage performance. Furthermore, 98% of the area is covered by QAM 64 and QAM 16 modulations, resulting in spectral efficiency of 3.24 bit/sec/Hz.

With the same 11 base station locations, the typical solution from competitor products provides only 94% coverage, with 77% of the area covered by QAM modulations and an average spectral efficiency of only 2.1 bit/sec/Hz.

To achieve similar performance of BreezeMAX with a typical competition solution requires 28 base stations, which means much more investment in equipment, backhaul transmission and site acquisition and operational costs.

Quality of Service
Quality of service (QoS) is essential for the successful implementation of multi-service functionality in broadband wireless networks, especially for voice and other delay sensitive applications. The BreezeMAX system provides different levels of QoS according to the IEEE 802.16-2004 and WiMAX standards. As part of its “standards plus” policy, BreezeMAX implements a dynamic resource allocation protocol (DRAP) that provides admission & congestion control within the wireless domain of the network. DRAP is an innovative, solution providing efficient mapping of the voice and signaling traffic in a VoIP network to proper QoS levels over the air in the wireless network.