Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

WiMAX Bit Error Rate (BER) with AWGN Channel for Variable
Modulation Techniques
SAVITRI BEVINAKOPPA, DEV KRISHNA SHRESTHA
School of IT and Engineering
Melbourne Institute of Technology
284-294 La Trobe Street, Melbourne Victoria 3000
AUSTRALIA
sbevinakoppa@mit.edu.au, simplydave@gmail.com

Abstract: - The demand for high speed internet for mobile and wireless application is increasingly exponential.
In order to fulfil this requirement and overcome the limitation of the existing technologies, researcher
developed advanced and efficient technologies, eg. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
based on Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX). This technology provides high speed
internet over wide coverage area for small as well as medium enterprise sectors.
This paper gives analysis of the Bit Error Rate of WiMAX under various modulation schemes (BPSK,
QPSK, QAM) and varying Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) to evaluate the bandwidth efficiency and propose the
optimum solution with acceptable data rate maintaining the Quality of Service (QoS). The use of these codes
reduces the bit error in Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel and the Forward Error Correction
(FEC) help to transmit high data in limited bandwidth channel. Simulink software is used for the simulation.

Key-Words: - WiMAX, Bit Error Rate, Modulation, AWGN, OFDM, Simulink

1 Introduction Several frequency bands can be utilised to deploy

The rapid growth of the mobile devices and demand
of high speed data motivated to find an optimum
wireless system. Number of wireless access systems
have been developed but could not fully satisfy the
demand of data for consumers and applications.
These systems varied widely in their performance
capabilities, protocols, frequency spectrum used and
applications supports. The emergence of WiMAX as
a standard can address these demands of the
wireless environment [1]. World Interoperability for
Microwave Access (WiMAX) is an Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDM),
IEEE 802.16 standard family based technology
suitable for high speed data fixed, roaming, portable
and mobile access. It also supports high sector
throughput, multiple handoff mechanisms, power-
saving mechanisms for mobile devices, advanced
Quality of Service (QoS) and low latency for
improved support of real-time applications,
advanced authorization, authentication and
accounting (AAA) functionality. It delivers Voice
over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Video streaming at a
low cost compared to existing technologies and can
have coverage area up to 50kms with bandwidth up
72Mbps.
The availability of the frequency spectrum
is the key to provide broadband wireless services.
WiMAX. The performance of the system varies on
the characteristics of the frequency used.
Section 2 highlights literature review of the
existing techniques. Section 3 explains the design
methodology used in Simulink and results are
analysed in section 4. Section 5 is a conclusion of
the work done.
2 Background
Bit Error Rate (BER) is an important measurement
to determine the integrity of the transmitted data in a
communication system. The performance of the
wireless communication system can be determined
by analysing the BER in the noisy channel
(transmission medium). Thus combination of
different coding and modulation technique will be
used to reduce the effect of noise and achieve the
optimum BER for high speed data communication.
Combined Effect of Block interleaving and
Forward Error Correction (FEC) on BER
performance of OFDM based WiMAX (IEEE
802.16d) is discussed in paper [2], where the system
of Block Interleaving on BER performance of
WiMAX physical layer for different modulation is
analysed and found that addition of interleaving
with FEC improves the system performance by

ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5 91
 Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
reducing the burst errors during the transmission. It
suggests the improvement in performance can be
achieved by adding other techniques like
convolution interleaving, and frequency
interleaving. Thus, in this paper, interleaving
scheme has been added to minimise the BER and
improve the performance of the WiMAX. BER vs
SNR (with and without using the coding techniques)
has been compared and result shows that the
minimum error can be achieved by using the coding
technique than the simulation that does not uses the
coding scheme at the same SNR.
2.1 WiMAX
WiMAX [1] is similar to Wi-Fi but with longer
range, higher speed and can handle large numbers of
user. WiMAX can be used in the areas where there
are no internet accesses due to lack of infrastructure.
WiMAX provides two types of services:
Non Line of sight services: In this type of
service, WiMAX uses low frequency range of 2 Ghz
to 11Ghz which are not easily affected by physical
obstructions, because of their ability to diffract,
bend around obstacles.
Line of sight services: This type of services
connects via fixed dish antenna at line of sight with
WiMAX tower. It uses higher frequencies thus has
less interference and high bandwidth.
2.1.1 WiMAX Architecture
The IEEE 802.16e - 2005 standard provides the air
interface for WiMAX. The WiMAX Forums
Network Working Group (NWG) developing the
network requirement, architecture and protocols.
WiMAX architecture can be logically divide into
three parts
Mobile Station (MS): Subscriber or the end
user uses MS as the source of network connection.
Base station (BS) provides air interface for mobile
stations.
Access Service Network (ASN): It consists
gateway to built radio access at the end points and
comprises more than two base stations. The radio
resource management, encryption keys, routing to
the selected network and client functionality are
carried out by ASN.
Connectivity Service Network (CNS):
responsible for internet connections i.e. provides IP
functions for corporate, public networks and other
users.
WiMAX base station broadcasts signals
through tower (fixed or mobile). Fixed tower
connects with home or office subscriber units and
operates on high power transmission covering up-to
50kms. Mobile tower connects smaller devices and
ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5
are limited due to processing power and battery
limitation of the subscriber devices.
Receiver receives the signal from the base
station and connects to the networks. These devices
are referred as Customer Premises Equipment (CPE)
and can be indoor or outdoor based on the distance
to the nearest base station.
The WiMAX is considered to be successful
if it address the challenges like delivering
multimega bits per second throughput to the end
user, with QoS to variety of services (data, voice,
and multimedia), supporting IP based applications
to fixed as well as mobile devices without
compromising the quality, reliability and security
and should have better performance than the
existing technologies like 3G, WiFi [3].
The signal travels through various obstacles
such as buildings, interference from with signals,
noise, delay, distortion, relative motion between the
transmitter and receiver. To design the
communication system which works under these
condition and delivers high data rates as well as
support high-speed mobility is the matter of
challenging.
The received signal strength decreases in
fast rate with the distance in case of non line of sight
environment. This power loss is referred as path loss
which is caused by the factors, such as obstruction,
antenna height, terrain etc. Assuming the antenna
used is isotropic and signal energy expands over a
spherical wave front, then the power at receiver at
distance d from transmitter is given by free space
pathloss formula or Friis formula as
Pr= Pt(GtGr/(4d)^2) Eq - 1
Where, Pr = received power
Pt = Transmitted power
= Wavelength of carrier signal
Gt and Gr = gain of the transmitter and
receiver antennas.
Since = c/f, the higher frequency waves
decreases the received power.
Intersymbol Interference: This is the
result of multipath when the transmitted symbol
arrives at the receiver during the nest symbol period
and cause Intersymbol Interference (ISI). Since the
data rate is high in WiMAX, the symbol time is
shorter, thus it take only smaller delay to cause ISI.
This issue can be dealt with Equalisation, but it
requires high processing power. Equalisation is
implemented at the receiver in an attempt to reverse
the channel distortion. The optimum solution to
deal with ISI is Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing (OFDM), where large numbers of
subcarriers are used in parallel i.e. sends L signals
92
 Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
with bandwidth B/L at the same time. Thus, B/L <<
Bc (Bc = carrier bandwidth), each signal undergoes
flat fading and time dispersion will be negligible.
Noise: Additive White Gaussian Noise
(AWGN) is the most basic noise in communication
channel. Since the thermal noise is directly
proportional to the bandwidth, the broadband
receiver experience higher noise than the
narrowband system and reduces the coverage area
of the broadband system.
Doppler Spread: Doppler spread is the
result of the relative motion between the transmitter
and the receiver which causes the carrier frequency
dispersion. This result in the loss of signal to noise
ratio (SNR), difficult in recovery and
synchronisation of carrier signal that damages the
orthogonality of OFDM subcarriers.
Multipath Fading: The reflection,
refraction and scattering to the transmitted signal
while travelling causes the receiver to receive the
signal via different paths. This results in the
variation of the amplitude of the received signal and
the effect is called as multipath fading.
Shadowing: is the loss of power in the
process of propagation of the signal around the large
obstacle such as buildings, trees via diffraction etc.
The power at the received signal can be high due to
temporary line of sight transmission path. The
standard method to account these effects is to
introduce shadowing in the pathloss formula i.e.
Pr = PtPo(do/d)^
Po = measured pathloss
Do = reference distance
= pathloss exponent
= sample of shadowing random process.
OFDM based physical layer [4]: OFDM
based physical layer is resistance to multipath and
operate well in non line of sight environment.
WiMAX signal uses OFDM techniques and the
bandwidth can range from 1.25 to 20 MHz.
Maintain the orthogonality between the individual
subcarrier, the symbol period must be reciprocal to
the carrier spacing. In OFDM based transmission,
the high bit stream is divided into number of low bit
streams, which are each modulated separately by
subcarriers. These features eliminate ISI.
In OFDM, the available channel bandwidth
is subdivided into number of equal-bandwidth sub
channels. The behaviour of the channel is not
constant, therefore by selecting f wisely, the
channel can be made over the sub band avoiding
channel distortion.
The available different information symbols
are multiplexed on the subcarrier and transmitted
simultaneously and synchronously. In case of
ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5
OFDM transmission each modulation symbol is
mainly confined to a relatively narrow bandwidth.
Thus, for OFDM transmission over a frequency-
selective channel, certain modulation symbols may
be fully confined to a frequency band with very low
instantaneous signal strength.
Thus, the individual modulation symbols
will typically not experience any substantial
frequency diversity even if the channel is highly
frequency selective over the overall OFDM
transmission bandwidth. As a consequence, the BER
performance of OFDM transmission over a
frequency-selective channel is relatively poor. In
practice channel coding is used in most cases of
digital communication and especially in mobile
communication. Channel coding implies that each
bit of information to be transmitted is spread over
several code bits. If these coded bits are mapped to a
set of OFDM subcarriers that are well distributed
over the overall transmission bandwidth of the
OFDM signal, each information bit will experience
frequency diversity in the case of transmission over
a radio channel that is frequency selective over the
transmission bandwidth.
Traffic Handling Capacity of WIMAX:
Mobile WiMAX is the standard [5] for broadband
(high-speed) wireless access (BWA) in a
metropolitan area. WiMAX allows any available
bandwidth to be used that may vary from 1.25 MHz
to 28 MHz. The available channel is divided into
several equally spaced subcarriers. Among these sub
carriers, some are used for data transmission, some
for monitoring quality of channel (pilot subcarriers),
safety (guard subcarriers). WiMAX uses QPSK,
QAM for modulation and FEC (Forward Error
Correction) for coding.
WiMAX uses both TDD and FDD for
Uplink (Mobile station to Base Station) and
Downlink (Base Station to Mobile Station) such that
same frequency is shared for UL and DL but
alternate in time.
DL = Down Link; UL = Uplink
TTG = Transmit to Transmit Gap
RTG = Receive to Transmit Gap
Modulation and Coding: WiMAX supports
different type of modulation and coding schemes.
The modulation and coding techniques maintain
steady signal strength by using different scheme
over increasing distance. The dynamic bandwidth
allocation technique monitors the network from
interference in signal strength which allows base
station to allocate more bandwidth to affected
stream. The subscriber provides feedback to the
base station about the downlink channel quality
which helps base station to estimate the channel
93
 Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
quality for uplink. The Modulation techniques used
are BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM and coding
scheme are convolution codes at 1/2, 2/3, 3/4, and
5/6.
Antenna Techniques: WiMAX uses directional
antennas with wireless signal between base station
and receiver station. This reduces the interference
from noise, as signal is direct between two points.
To determine the interference in the path, dynamic
frequency selection scheme is applied and specific
frequency is selected to avoid interference. These
techniques are implemented by Multiple Input
Multiple Output (MIMO) technique [6] where
multiple antennas are used at both transmitter and
receiver side. Throughput and efficiency increase of
these techniques, as it reduces power consumption,
frequency re-use and bandwidth efficiency. Multi-
antenna techniques can be used to achieve improved
system performance, including
improved system capacity (more users per cell)
improved coverage (possibility for larger cells),
improved service provisioning, for example,
higher per-user data rates
3 Design Methodology in Simulink
Matlab Simulink [7] is used to simulate
communication system, since the features like
simulation, automatic code generation, and
continuous test makes it easy to analysis and instant
changes can be made without affecting the entire
design. The option of output sink like scope make it
Fig. 1: Simulink model for WiMAX process
ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5
more flexible, since extra hardware is not needed to
analysis the output and can generate graph to verify
the design.
For the real time simulation, CelPlanner
software is used since it has the function to define
the interested geographical location and can specify
the base stations, number of subscriber and link
budget. It also accounts the effect of the
environment like buildings, vegetation, water
resources on the performance of the system.
3.1 Simulation Model
Fig. 1 shows the design of WiMAX which is based
on the physical layer of the IEEE 802.16 WiMAX
OFDM. In this simulation design, only the basic
features are included. The data from the source is
randomized before feeding to Forward Error
Correction (FEC). FEC uses RS code and
Convolution coding to encode data bits which are
then passed to block interleaver and then mapped
into QPSK/QAM symbols. The symbol is
modulated onto subcarrier by applying Inverse Fast
Fourier Transform (IFFT). The output is converted
to serial data and a cyclic prefix of 1/32 is added to
make system immune to Inter Symbol Interference
(ISI). Then the signal is transmitted through
Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel.
The receiver, after receiving the transmitted signal,
performs the reverse operation of the transmitter.
The significant block of the simulation model is
discussed below.
94
 Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Randomization: Randomizer avoids long
sequence of continuous ones and zeros of the
information bits before transmission. This is
implemented with Pseudo Random Binary Sequence
(PRBT) generator which uses 15 stage shift register
with a generator polynomial of 1+x^14+x^15 with
XOR gates.
Forward Error Correction (FEC): FEC
consists of RS coding followed by Convolution
coding to correct most errors generated in the
channel. The last block is interleaver to avoid long
burst errors.
Reed Solomon Encoder: A Reed-Solomon
code is defined as RS (N, K, T) with 1 bit symbol
which means the encoder uses K data symbols of 1
bit each and adds 2T parity symbols to create an N
symbol code word. Thus,
N = total number of bytes after the encoding
process
K = total number of data bytes before the
encoding process
T = total number of bytes that can be
corrected.
The error correction capability of RS code is
given by (N-K) which is the measure of redundancy
in the block. The standard RS code encoder is create
with N=255, K=239 and T=8.
Convolution Encoder: The output from the
RS encoder is fed to Convolution encoder with rate
, constraint length 7 and the generator polynomials
are used to produce its two code bits.
The puncturing operation at output of the
convolution encoder is used for different coding
rate. At the decoder, the received data is passed
through Viterbi algorithm, which is a soft input
maximum likelihood sequence estimator.
Interleaver: The output from the forward
error correction is passed through interleaver which
adjacent coded bits are mapped onto non adjacent
subcarriers or onto less or more significant bits of
the constellation to reduce long stream of unusable
bits.
Modulation [8]: The bits from interleaver
are passed through constellation mapper where
modulation is carried out (BPSK, QPSK, nQAM).
Binary Phase Shift Keying (BPSK) uses two
phases separated by 180 to represent the binary
digits. BPSK is robust and powerful against noise in
low data rate application.
QPSK is a four level phase shift keying in
which each element is represented by two bits and
uses the phase shift of /2 (90 phase shift). Since it
uses four symbols, it has higher spectral efficiency
than BPSK.
ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM)
[9] is the most powerful modulation scheme used in
wireless standards, since it combines amplitude shift
keying and phase shift keying. Thus, two different
signals are sent concurrently on the same carrier
frequency but one is shifted by 90 with respect to
other signal.
Subcarrier allocation: WiMAX standard
specifies three types of subcarrier which are data,
pilot and null subcarriers. The mapped data are
arranged in matrix, where number of row is equal to
the number of data subcarriers. The pilot and null
subcarriers are then added to form the total
subcarriers.
IFFT: The time domain signal after
modulation is generated using IFFT. It also
maintains the orthogonality of subcarriers and is the
efficient way of modulation of the subcarrier in
parallel.
Cyclic Prefix [5]: Cyclic prefix is added to
the time domain sample to reduce the effect of
multipath. The integration interval in the correlation
receiver (=symbol period T) will not necessarily
correspond to an integer number of periods of each
subcarrier of that path. As a consequence, in case of
a time-dispersive channel there will not only be
inter-symbol interference within a subcarrier, but
also interference between subcarriers.
Thus, to avoid ISI and maintain
orthogonality, a cyclic prefix is appended to each
block of N signal samples. Four types of cyclic
prefix are provided in the standard. It is taken as G
which is the ratio of CP time to OFDM symbol time
and can be equal to 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32.
In OFDM the encoding and decoding of the
modulated signal are carried out in frequency
domain. It breaks the wideband signal of bandwidth
B into L narrowband signals (subcarriers) of
bandwidth B/L. The L subcarriers are modulated
using IFFT operation and cyclic prefix is appended.
Then the symbols are sent in serial through
wideband channel. At the receiver, the cyclic prefix
is removed and the symbol is demodulated using
FFT operation.
BER is the rate at which the error occurs
while transmitting data which can be simplified by
the formula below
Bit Error Rate (BER) = Number of errors /
Total number of bits transmitted.
BER depends on the medium between the
receiver and transmitter and Signal to Noise Ratio
(SNR) i.e. good medium and high SNR results in
negligible BER. But the medium is not noiseless
and vary with the propagation path. Thus, the
selection of channel plays vital role while analysing
95
 Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
BER. The second issue is with the modulation
scheme. Each modulation technique performs
different in presence of noise. Higher order
modulation scheme (64QAM) are capable of
delivering high data are not robust as lower
modulation schemes (BPSK, QPSK) which offer
low data rate. BER can be affected by number of
factors but by adjusting the performance parameter
the system can be optimised. These performance
parameters are interference, transmitting power,
modulation scheme and bandwidth.
The purpose of this research is to determine
the Bit Error Rate in various modulation technique
of WiMAX. Simulink library has various
communication blocks, filters and channels. From
the literature review, BER can be improved by
adding channel code block.
The use of RS code correct the burst error
where as the convolution code corrects the random
error generated during transmission in multipath
channels. The use of these codes reduces the bit
error in AWGN channel and the FEC help to
transmit high data in limited bandwidth channel.
Fig. 2: Simulation of 4QAM
ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5
4. Simulation Result
WiMAX models with various modulation schemes
[10] have been simulated as shown in Fig. 2
(4QAM), Fig. 3 (64QAM), Fig. 4 (BPSK) and Fig. 5
(QPSK). This simulation supports all the
modulation and coding schemes mentioned in the
WiMAX. The performance evaluation was done on
the basis of error rate as shown in Table 1 for
varying signal to noise ratio. The BER vs SNR
curve are used to compare as shown in Fig. 6, 7 and
8 and analysed the performance of different
modulation schemes. The results show the overview
of WiMAX system with varying modulation
techniques under AWGN channel. From the
analysis, we can conclude that 64QAM provides
high data rate but require high bandwidth where as
BPSK require less bandwidth, efficient but has low
data rate. 4QAM and QPSK provide data rate
between BPSK and 64QAM and bandwidth
requirement are more than BPSK but less than
64QAM. BPSK provides the least value of BER
where as 64QAM has highest BER. 4QAM and
QPSK have BER values in between BPSK and
64QAM.
96
 Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Fig. 3: Simulation of 64QAM

Fig. 4: Simulation of BPSK

ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5 97
 Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Fig. 5: Simulation of QPSK

Table 1: SNR vs BER of various modulation

schemes

SNR Bit Error Rate(BER)

(dB) 64 QAM 4 QAM QPSK BPSK
2 .5 .5029 .4945 .4922
4 .5 .5088 .5032 .4983
6 .5036 .5013 .4942 .5058
8 .5097 .5016 .4922 .4918
10 .4818 .5045 .5214 .5035
12 .3314 .5214 .5016 .5097
14 .0958 .5166 .4951 .5019
16 .0156 .5052 .4970 .5019
18 .0003 .5013 .4951 .5019
20 0 .5019 .4931 .5019
Fig. 6: SNR vs BER in 64QAM

ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5 98
 Recent Advances in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

speed. It supports various modulation schemes such

as QAM, BPSK, QPSK etc.
This paper gives analysis of various
modulation schemes of WiMax with AGWN. The
performance evaluation was done on the basis of
error rate for varying signal to noise ratio. The BER
vs SNR graphs show that 64QAM provides high
data rate but require high bandwidth where as BPSK
require less bandwidth, efficient but has low data
rate. 4QAM and QPSK provide data rate between
BPSK and 64QAM and bandwidth requirement are
more than BPSK but less than 64QAM. BPSK
provides the least value of BER where as 64QAM
has highest BER. 4QAM and QPSK have BER
values in between BPSK and 64QAM.

Fig. 7: SNR vs BER in 4QAM Reference:

[1] L. Korowajczuk, LTE, WiMAX and WLAN Network
Design, Optimization and Performance Analysis, Second
Edition, 2011, John Wiley and Sons
[2] A. Agrawal, S. N. Mehta, Combined Effect of Block
interleaving and FEC on BER performance of OFDM
based WiMAX(IEEE 802.16d) system, American
Journal of Electrical and Electronics Engineering,
Volume 3, No. 1,pp. 4-12, 4 March, 2015
[3] J. G.Andrews, A. Ghosh, R. Muhamed, Fundamentals
of WiMAX Broadband Wireless Networking, Prentice
Hall, 2007,US
[4] R. Nee, OFDM Physical Layer Specification for the
5 GHz Band, January 1998, Lucent Technologies Bell
Labs Research
[5] M. Ma, Current Technology Developments of WiMAX
Systems, Springer, 2009
Fig. 8: SNR vs BER in BPSK [6] Q. Li, G. Li, W. Lee, M. Lee, et. al., MIMO
Techniques in WiMAX and LTE: A Feature Overview,
IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2010, pp. 86-92
[7] http://au.mathworks.com/products/simulink/ retrieved
on 22/8/15
[8] B.P. Lathi, Modern Digital and Analog
Communication System, Third edition, Oxford University
Press, 1998
[9] W. CY. Lee, Wireless and Cellular
Telecommunications, Third Edition, 2006, The McGraw-
Hill Companies, Inc. USA.
[10] M.D. McKinley, K.A. Remley, J.S. Kenney, M.
Myslinski, Comparison of QPSK and 64QAM EVM for
an OFDM WLAN signal at 2.4 GHz and 4.9 GHz in a
multipath environment, IEEE International Symposium
on Antennas and Propagation Society, 2009, APSURSI
'09. pp. 1 - 4
Fig. 9: SNR vs BER of QPSK

5 Conclusion
WiMAX physical layer depends on Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM)
transmission scheme, which delivers data at higher

ISBN: 978-1-61804-340-5 99