Towards a common benchmark in WiMAX environment

Moves towards providing a common benchmarks in different network environments have recently been undertaken. Such suites define network topologies, simulation scenarios i.e. traffic characteristics, as well as the evaluation parameters. Determining the essential parameters of a simulation environment enables comparison of new enhancements under comparable conditions. The next-generation wireless technology – WiMAX is designed to enable high-speed, mobile Internet access to the wide array of devices. It delivers low-cost, open networks as well as a solution for the efficient transmission with QoS (Quality of Service) support, at the Media Access Control (MAC) layer for guaranteeing multimedia transmissions. One of the most important part of this architecture is the scheduling algorithm which determines the available resource allocation. The paper aims at proposing recommendations for a common WiMAX evaluation suite. The authors point out the particular aspects of WiMAX technologies that may influence the overall network performance. The basic WiMAX topologies are suggested as well as the traffic scenarios and the evaluation parameters. We also introduce a solution that allows using a real-world, proprietary scheduler algorithm implementation in the ns-2 simulator.