Fundamentals of WiMAX: Understanding Broadband Wireless Networking [Hardcover]

Jeffrey G. Andrews (Author), Arunabha Ghosh (Author), Rias Muhamed (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 9, 2007 | ISBN-10: 0132225522 | ISBN-13: 978-0132225526 | Edition: 1

This is the eBook version of the printed book.

Praise for Fundamentals of WiMAX

"This book is one of the most comprehensive books I have reviewed ... it is a must-read for engineers and students planning to remain current or who plan to pursue a career in telecommunications. I have reviewed other publications on WiMAX and have been disappointed. This book is refreshing in that it is clear that the authors have the in-depth technical knowledge and communications skills to deliver a logically laid out publication that has substance to it."

–Ron Resnick, President, WiMAX Forum

"This is the first book with a great introductory treatment of WiMAX technology. It should be essential reading for all engineers involved in WiMAX. The high-level overview is very useful for those with non-technical background. The introductory sections for OFDM and MIMO technologies are very useful for those with implementation background and some knowledge of communication theory. The chapters covering physical and MAC layers are at the appropriate level of detail. In short, I recommend this book to systems engineers and designers at different layers of the protocol, deployment engineers, and even students who are interested in practical applications of communication theory."

–Siavash M. Alamouti, Chief Technology Officer, Mobility Group, Intel

"This is a very well-written, easy-to-follow, and comprehensive treatment of WiMAX. It should be of great interest."

–Dr. Reinaldo Valenzuela, Director of Wireless Research, Bell Labs

"Fundamentals of WiMAX is a comprehensive guide to WiMAX from both industry and academic viewpoints, which is an unusual accomplishment. I recommend it to anyone who is curious about this exciting new standard."

–Dr. Teresa Meng, Professor, Stanford University, Founder and Director, Atheros Communications

"Andrews, Ghosh, and Muhamed have provided a clear, concise, and well-written text on 802.16e/WiMAX. The book provides both the breadth and depth to make sense of the highly complicated 802.16e standard. I would recommend this book to both development engineers and technical managers who want an understating of WiMAX and insight into 4G modems in general."

–Paul Struhsaker, VP of Engineering, Chipset platforms, Motorola Mobile Device Business Unit, former vice chair of IEEE 802.16 working group

"Fundamentals of WiMAX is written in an easy-to-understand tutorial fashion. The chapter on multiple antenna techniques is a very clear summary of this important technology and nicely organizes the vast number of different proposed techniques into a simple-to-understand framework."

–Dr. Ender Ayanoglu, Professor, University of California, Irvine, Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Communications

"Fundamentals of WiMAX is a comprehensive examination of the 802.16/WiMAX standard and discusses how to design, develop, and deploy equipment for this wireless communication standard. It provides both insightful overviews for those wanting to know what WiMAX is about and comprehensive, in-depth chapters on technical details of the standard, including the coding and modulation, signal processing methods, Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channels, medium access control, mobility issues, link-layer performance, and system-level performance."

–Dr. Mark C. Reed, Principal Researcher, National ICT Australia, Adjunct Associate Professor, Australian National University

"This book is an excellent resourc...

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jeffrey G. Andrews is an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He has developed CDMA systems for Qualcomm and consulted with many organizations including the WiMAX Forum, Microsoft, and NASA. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Arunabha Ghosh, a principal member of technical staff at AT&T Labs, specializes in wireless communication theory and signal processing and has been involved in standardization efforts in the WiMAX Forum. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Rias Muhamed is a lead member of technical staff at AT&T Labs. He has led several research and technology assessment projects in fixed wireless broadband at AT&T Labs. He is a senior member of the IEEE and holds an M.S. from Virginia Tech.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Fundamentals of WiMAX was consciously written to appeal to a broad audience, and to be of value to anyone who is interested in the IEEE 802.16e standards or wireless broadband networks more generally. The book contains cutting-edge tutorials on the technical and theoretical underpinnings to WiMAX that are not available anywhere else, while also providing high-level overviews that will be informative to the casual reader. The entire book is written with a tutorial approach that should make most of the book accessible and useful to readers who do not wish to bother with equations and technical details, but the details are there for those who want a rigorous understanding. In short, we expect this book to be of great use to practicing engineers, managers and executives, graduate students who want to learn about WiMAX, undergraduates who want to learn about wireless communications, attorneys involved with regulations and patents pertaining to WiMAX, and members of the financial community who want to understand exactly what WiMAX promises.

Organization of the Book

The book is organized into three parts with a total of twelve chapters. Part I provides an introduction to broadband wireless and WiMAX. Part II presents a collection of rigorous tutorials covering the technical and theoretical foundations upon which WiMAX is built. In Part III we present a more detailed exposition of the WiMAX standard, along with a quantitative analysis of its performance.

In Part I, Chapter 1 provides the background information necessary for understanding WiMAX. We provide a brief history of broadband wireless, enumerate its applications, discuss the market drivers and competitive landscape, and present a discussion of the business and technical challenges to building broadband wireless networks. Chapter 2 provides an overview of WiMAX and serves as a summary of the rest of the book. This chapter is written as a standalone tutorial on WiMAX and should be accessible to anyone interested in the technology.

We begin Part II of the book with Chapter 3, where the immense challenge presented by a time-varying broadband wireless channel is explained. We quantify the principal effects in broadband wireless channels, present practical statistical models, and provide an overview of diversity countermeasures to overcome the challenges. Chapter 4 is a tutorial on OFDM, where the elegance of multicarrier modulation and the theory of how it works are explained. The chapter emphasizes a practical understanding of OFDM system design and discusses implementation issues for WiMAX systems such as the peak-to-average ratio. Chapter 5 presents a rigorous tutorial on multiple antenna techniques covering a broad gamut of techniques from simple receiver diversity to advanced beamforming and spatial multiplexing. The practical considerations in the application of these techniques to WiMAX are also discussed. Chapter 6 focuses on OFDMA, another key-ingredient technology responsible for the superior performance of WiMAX. The chapter explains how OFDMA can be used to enhance capacity through the exploitation of multiuser diversity and adaptive modulation, and also provides a survey of different scheduling algorithms. Chapter 7 covers end-to-end aspects of broadband wireless networking such as QoS, session management, security, and mobility management. WiMAX being an IP-based network, this chapter highlights some of the relevant IP protocols used to build an end-to-end broadband wireless service. Chapters 3 though 7 are more likely to be of interest to practicing engineers, graduate students, and others wishing to understand the science behind the WiMAX standard.

In Part III of the book, Chapters 8 and 9 describe the details of the physical and media access control layers of the WiMAX standard and can be viewed as a distilled summary of the far more lengthy IEEE 802.16e-2005 and IEEE 802.16-2004 specifications. Sufficient details of these layers of WiMAX are provided in these chapters to enable the reader to gain a solid understanding of the salient features and capabilities of WiMAX and build computer simulation models for performance analysis. Chapter 10 describes the networking aspects of WiMAX, and can be thought of as a condensed summary of the end-to-end network systems architecture developed by the WiMAX Forum. Chapters 11 and 12 provide an extensive characterization of the expected performance of WiMAX based on the research and simulation-based modeling work of the authors. Chapter 11 focuses on the link-level performance aspects, while Chapter 12 presents system-level performance results for multicellular deployment of WiMAX.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 1 edition (March 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0132225522
• ISBN-13: 978-0132225526
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #434,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #75 in Books > Computers & Technology > Mobile & Wireless Computing > Programming

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Erros and lack of details make this a poor engineering reference, August 17, 2007

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F. Mo (TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fundamentals of WiMAX: Understanding Broadband Wireless Networking (Hardcover)

I was looking for a book on WiMax as a reference for designing WiMax radios. Trying to understand WiMax by reading the IEEE 802.16, 16e standards is difficult. The original 802.16-2004 standard was organized in a convoluted way. On top of that there were numerous errors, even in the mathematical formula and the critical system parameters. 16e was written as a errata and addendum to .16. Given the amount of major changes required by .16e, this format of a .16+.16e makes it almost impossible to read to gain engineering understanding. I was looking for a book that could untangle this mess and present the information in .16+.16e in a linear and logical way, if not the MAC, at least the PHYs. The Andrews book does not serve this purpose. Most of the technical details of the WiMax system are missing. For example, a WiMax radio starts with transmitting or receiving the preambles. There are hundreds of preambles in WiMax. I would expect the book to describe all these preambles for reference. It would be even better, if there are insights into the mathematical properties of these preambles for the receiver design. If you agree with my statement, just let me say that the Andrews book contains none of the details the preambles beyond saying WiMax has something called preamble. Of the limited amount of PHY details the book did contain, there are critical errors. For example, the book seems to suggest that the downlink PUSC subchannels consist of two chunks of contiguous OFDM subcarriers of 14 each. According to the 802.16/16e, the 28 subcarriers in a subchannel are scattered. For the lack of details, I feel this book serves poorly as an engineering design reference. It also serves poorly as a guide to untangle the material in IEE802.16/16e due to the lack of details and the critical errors.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars $69.99 buys you depth, May 28, 2007

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jose.r-s (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Fundamentals of WiMAX: Understanding Broadband Wireless Networking (Hardcover)

As of May 28 2007, if you are going to fork some money onto a WiMax book, this book should be it. The authors were smart to concentrate in explaining the technology building blocks of the standard instead of just following the structure of the 802.16 document. I have read mostly the chapters related to the PHY and I found the explanations and examples clear and to the point. Even if you are not interested in the WiMax standard per se, this book contains very good information about OFDM/OFDMA and multi-antenna techniques for broadband wireless systems. It also has a couple of chapters about link level and system level performance of WiMax that add even more depth to the book.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars an engineer's book, May 15, 2007

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W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fundamentals of WiMAX: Understanding Broadband Wireless Networking (Hardcover)

Andrews suggests in the Preface that the book will be suited to a wide range of people who want to learn about WiMax. From engineers to graduate students to managers and executives and others. Indeed, there are high level descriptions, scattered throughout the chapters, accessible to those without an engineering degree. But typically, these are introductory summary remarks. The bulk of every chapter is really best understood if you have that engineering background. While the author naturally desires as wide an audience as possible, this is really an engineer's book.

The overviews do show that WiMax exhibits strong advantages over the current and popular WiFi. Like having robust security protocols, including the Advanced Encryption Standard (aka Rijndael) and 3DES. Plus WiMax has terminals that possess built-in digital certificates with public and private keys and MAC addresses. Contrast this with WiFi, whose commonly used Wireless Encryption Protocol has some severe deficiencies.

Another important advantage of WiMax is how it supports extreme mobility modalities. Where you, the end user, can travel in a vehicle up to 120 kmph, and have seamless handoff between WiMax basestations.

Many chapters are highly mathematical. Indeed, one chapter on multi-antennas reads like an excursion into advanced linear algebra or matrix theory. It even evokes the Frobenius norm of a matrix, which I'd only ever seen before in a pure maths course.

Of all the chapters, maybe that which discusses Mobile IP could be the most interesting. It takes the Internet as we know it, and removes a serious current limitation to moving your machine, and having it keep connected to the Internet. Mobile IP is a cunning overlay on IPv4. While it can also be done, and much easier, in IPv6. The only problem is when the latter will start to dominate v4.

Overall, the book is a very promising pitch for WiMax deployment.