A Real-Time Implementation of the Mobile WiMAX ARQ and Physical Layer

This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-014-0890-3.[Abstract] This paper presents an innovative software-defined radio architecture for the real-time implementation of WiMAX transceivers. The architecture consists of commercially available field-programmable gate array and digital signal processor modules. We show how the architecture can be used for the real-time implementation of a full-featured standard-compliant time-division duplex WiMAX physical layer together with the ARQ functionality of the MAC layer. Both the mobile and the base station contain a transmitter and a receiver to enable real-time concurrent downlink and uplink communications. The design supports the different configurations defined by the standard and the WiMAX Forum. This work also provides the verification and validation of the proposed real-time implementation based on repeatable and reproducible performance evaluation considering the reference scenarios defined by the WiMAX Forum, including both static and mobile scenarios. Typical figures of merit such as physical-layer bit and frame error rates and MAC-layer throughput are obtained with the help of a custom-made real-time channel emulator implementing the channel models defined by the WiMAX Forum.This work has been partially supported by Indra Sistemas S.A. and the Spanish Ministry of Defence with the technical direction of PEC/ITM under grant DN8644-COINCIDENTE. The authors wish to thank J. M. Camas-Albar from Indra Sistemas S.A. for his help. This work has been additionally funded by Xunta de Galicia, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacin of Spain, and FEDER funds of the European Union under grants with numbers 2012/287, TEC2010-19545-C04-01, and CSD2008-00010.Xunta de Galicia; 2012/28