| WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) is an innovative communication technology for broadband wireless access to the Internet. Because of high bandwidth and large coverage, WiMAX has experienced exponential growth over the past few years. Many telecommunication companies around the world have started to offer WiMAX-based services. The main advantage of WiMAX is its ability to provide flexible and cost-effective broadband access to areas where it is difficult to have a wired infrastructure. However, despite of the popularity of WiMAX, the performance of WiMAX-based transmission in the Internet (end-to-end data transmission involving WiMAX links) has not been thoroughly studied.;This thesis investigates the performance of end-to-end paths in the Internet when WiMAX links are used as the first and the last hop. Specifically, we investigated the behavior of file transfers in order to evaluate the downlink and uplink performance of WiMAX-based connections using the commercial WiMAX deployment offered by Bell Canada. We found several issues for WiMAX-based networks, including limited bandwidth, long round trip times, high jitter and unfairness during bidirectional transfer. We also compared the performance of WiMAX-based-transmission in and between two different cities. Based on the measurement results obtained, we present network deployment scenarios to achieve optimum performance for WiMAX-based networks. i... |
