Preface and Acknowledgements

WiMAX technology is presently one of the most promising global telecommunication systems. Great hopes and important investments have been made for WiMAX, which is a Broadband Wireless Access System having many applications: fixed or last-mile wireless access, backhauling, mobile cellular network, telemetering, etc. WiMAX is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard, having a rich set of features. This standard defines the Medium Access Layer and the Physical Layer of a fixed and mobile Broadband Wireless Access System. WiMAX is also based on the WiMAX Forum documents.

This book is intended to be a complete introduction to the WiMAX System without having the ambition to replace thousands of pages of documents of the IEEE 802.16 standard and amendments and WiMAX Forum documents. There will always be a need to refer to these for any technical development of a specific aspect of WiMAX.

Besides my teaching of other wireless systems (GSM/GPRS, UMTS and WiFi) and related research, I had the occasion to write a first presentation about WiMAX technology, by coincidence, in 2003 and then a WiMAX report. Student projects, PhD work and wireless network courses teaching then provided me with the building blocks for a first WiMAX document. Starting from February 2006, providing ENST Bretagne Inter-Enterprise training and WiMAX training for other specific companies allowed me to develop an even more complete presentation of WiMAX, using text and slides. I thought it might be helpful for colleague engineers, IT managers and undergraduate and graduate students to use this document as a clear and complete introduction to WiMAX technology. WiMAX users can then, if needed, access more easily some specific part of the standard for a specific development.

Some repetitions will be found in this book. This has been done on purpose in order to provide a complete description of the different aspects of this powerful but also sometimes complex technology.

The book can be divided globally into four independent parts. Part I, Chapters 1 to 4, is a global introduction to WiMAX. Part II, Chapters 5 and 6, describes the physical layer with a focus on the main features of the WiMAX physical layer, OFDM transmission and its OFDMA variant. Part III, Chapters 7 to 11, describes the MAC layer and, more specifically, the multiple access and the QoS Management of WiMAX. Part IV, Chapters 12 to 16, covers diverse topics: radio resource management, the network architecture, mobility and security. The book ends with some comparisons and a conclusion.

Without doubt, this book about such a recent technology could not have been published so early without precious help. I wish to thank Jérôme Brouet, from Alcatel, who agreed to write large parts of Chapters 12 and 13. His excellent knowledge of WiMAX has always been a great help to me. I thank trainee student Gérard Assaf for the very good work he provided for figures, synthesis notes and bibliography notes. I also thank trainee students and ENST Bretagne students Aymen Belghith, Maël Boutin, Matthieu Jubin, Ziad Noun and Badih Souhaid for the same type of help. Other student reports and projects were also useful.

I am grateful for the discussions and comments of (the list is not exhaustive) Olfa Ben Haddada, Luc Brignol, Nora Cuppens, Guillaume Lebrun, Bertrand Léonard and Bruno Tharon and my colleagues Xavier Lagrange, Laurence Rouillé and Philippe Godlewski. The wide knowledge of Francis Dupont about Internet and network security (and, by the way, a lot of other topics) helped me with the security chapter. Walid Hachem provided precious help. My colleague Xavier Lagrange provided total support for this book project.

I also wish to thank Prakash Iyer and Bruce Holloway from the WiMAX Forum for precious remarks and authorisations.

I acknowledge the reason for the existence of this book, the IEEE 802.16-2004 standard and its amendment 802.16e and WiMAX Forum Documents. I wish to thank the authors of these documents.

Sarah Hinton, my Project Editor at John Wiley & Sons, Ltd was extremely patient with me. In addition, she helped me a lot with this project.

I thank my parents-in-law Michelle and Marcel for their total support during the marathon last sprint when I invaded Marcel's office for three complete weeks, day and night. My mother Neema also had her share of this book effort.

I end these acknowledgements with the most important: I thank Gaëlle for her support throughout the long writing times. Our little wonder Alice provided me with some of the charming energy she spent for her first steps while I was finishing the book.

I did my best to produce an error-free book and to mention the source of every piece of information. I welcome any comment or suggestion for improvements or changes that could be implemented in possible future editions of this book. The email address for gathering feedback is wimax-thebook@mlistes.enst-bretagne.fr.