WiMAX-WiFi convergence with OFDM bridge

Nowadays, Wireless and mobile communications technologies are the most important areas, which are rapidly expanding either in horizontal or vertical directions. WiMAX is trying to compete with WiFi in coverage and data rate, while the inexpensive WiFi still very popular in both personal and business use. Efficient bandwidth usage, Multi-Standard convergence and Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are the main vertical tends in the wireless world. WiMAX-WiFi convergence as an ideal technology that provides the best of both worlds: WiMAX new features and the low cost of the WiFi. In order to create a heterogeneous network environment, differences between the two technologies have been investigated and resolved. In the Multi-Carrier WiMAX-WiFi Convergence, the mismatch between the fixed WiMAX-OFDM (Nfft=256) and the WiFi-OFDM (Nfft=64) has been confirmed as a physical layer issue that will never be solved as MAC layer problem; therefore the current proposal is how to build what we called the “Convergence-Bridge”. This bridge is like an extra thin layer, which is responsible for harmonizing the mismatch. For the WiFi-OFDM physical layer, the paper has selected the IEEE 802.11n OFDM standard while it is being developed. The proposal does not suggest changing the standard itself but modifying some functions to be configurable. The IEEE 802.11 standard has fixed the configurations for WiFi mode only, while our proposal is to set up these functions for WiFi and WiMAX modes