Performance Evaluation and Dimensioning of WiMAX

International audienceThis chapter tackles the challenging task of performance evaluation and dimensioning of WiMAX networks. It provides a simple analytical model which is able to take into account the effects of elastic traffic, radio channel variations and scheduling policy. Compared to packet-level simulation based evaluations, our model instantaneously delivers the dimension- ing parameters necessary for the deployment of a WiMAX network. Compared to existing analytical solutions, we derive closed-form expressions for all performance metrics. We com- pare the results obtained through analytical model with those of simulations. We show that our analytical model is not only accurate but also robust with respect to the modeling as- sumptions. Finally, the quick results produced through our analytical tool allows to carry out dimensioning analyses that otherwise require several thousands of evaluations, which would not be tractable with any simulation tool.