Master Thesis submitted to the University of Coimbra

There are several restrictions in the current access wireless technologies, such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), for the transmission of the multi-media applications. Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a broadband wireless technology based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16 standard and aims at enabling the development of wireless broadband services anytime and any-where. Therefore, it is a strong candidate to support multimedia applications in various deployment scenarios. This work presents the state of the art of the WiMAX technology and discusses the comparison with its major competitors. The assessment includes a technical study and a thorough conceptual analysis of the trade-off cost/benefit of the technologies under evaluation. A real testbed evaluation of the capabilities of both Fixed and Mobile WiMAX to support the most popular multimedia appli-cations, Voice over IP (VoIP) and Video Streaming, is performed. The experimental study allowed the quantification of the scalability levels supported by Fixed and Mobile WiMAX for the transmission of multiple VoIP and Video Streaming flows. Moreover, the results obtained in the scenarios tested, using different VoIP CODECs and videos with several distinct compression levels, provided insight on the tradeoffs that Internet Service Providers may achieve in order to provide good quality services to the maximum amount of clients. Overall, both Fixed and Mobile WiMAX showed interesting capabilities as a Broadband Wireless Access tech-nology for the support of multimedia applications in the next generation communication systems