Customer Reviews

WiMAX: Technology for Broadband Wireless Access

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If you have read the 802.16 standard this is not the book for you. It very closely follows its abysmal prose and its lack of clarity. You will find very few insights from the author about anything. To me, the point of writing a book about a standard should be to show how its pieces fit together, to give clear explanations on its foundations and to clarify the many obtuse parts of a several hundred page collective document. I did not find much of that in this book. Your money will be better spent buying "Fundamentals of WiMax" by Jeffrey Andrews et al.

Some errors are listed as follows. 1. Page 123. The UL-MAP message shown in Fig. 9.11 is incorrect. It shall not include the Base Station ID. 2. Page 165. The piggyback and bandwidth stealing mechanisms shown in Table 11.4 are incorrect. For example, rtPS, nrtPS and BE can use the bandwidth stealing.

One way to understand WiMAX is to peruse all of the IEEE 802.16 papers, that officially define this standard. Turgid thousands of pages, that are meant strictly as a reference. In contrast, Nuaymi offers a much easier and shorter read. The essential features of the standard have been distilled here.

The multiple layers are explained. To those engineers who are already dealing with the Internet or 802.11, many of the ideas of layer to layer handoffs will be familiar.

WiMAX certainly has great promise, with its expanded range, as compared with 802.11. Especially in rural regions where there might currently be sparse cellphone coverage. Existing wireless networks might not be economic to allow a comprehensive buildout in areas of sparse population. WiMAX offers the possibility, but not the certainty, of a viable technological and business model.

What is more problematic about applying the book's knowledge is to urban regions already well served by current wireless networks. Those succeeded in large part because there was nothing comparable in the wireless sphere, before them. It is unclear if WiMAX offers enough demonstrable advantages to displace or even supplant the existing nets.