Streaming Video Content Over IEEE 802.16/WiMAX Broadband Access

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) embodies the IEEE 802.16 family of standards that provide wireless broadband access to residential and commercial Internet subscribers. While other WiMAX applications exist, there is an increasing trend to employ WiMAX for last-mile Internet access to circumvent the high deployments costs and local loop distance limitations associated with wired Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) connections. We use the OPNET Modeler to simulate bandwidth intensive, delay sensitive, video traffic representative of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and other video-rich applications over WiMAX and ADSL. These video streams are typically encoded using MPEG-x codecs. Although marginally loss-tolerant, performance of these streams is inherently a function of available bandwidth, buffering, and delay characteristics of the underlying network. Hence, in this paper, we examine four performance factors while streaming two hours of video content to client subscribers to determine whether WiMAX can deliver access network performance comparable to ADSL for video applications.