WiMAX-WiFi techniques for baseband convergence and routing protocols

The focus of this study was to investigate solutions that, when implemented in any heterogeneous wireless network, shall enhance the existing standard and routing protocol connectivity without impacting the standard or changing the wireless transceiver’s functions. Thus achieving efficient interoperability at much reduced overheads. The techniques proposed in this research are centred on the lower layers. This because of the facts that WiMax and WiFi standards have not addressed the backward compatibility of the two technologies at the MAC and PHY layers, for both the baseband functions as well as the routing IP addresses. This thesis describes two innovate techniques submitted for a PhD degree. The first technique is to combine WiMax and WiFi signals so to utilise the same "baseband implementation chain" to handle both of these technologies, thus insuring ubiquitous data communication. WiMax-WiFi Baseband Convergence (W2BC) implementation is proposed to offer an optimum configurable solution targeted at combining the 802.16d WiMax and the 802.11a WiFi technologies. This approach provides a fertile ground for future work into combining more OFDM based wireless technologies. Based on analysis and simulation, the W2BC can achieve saving in device cost, size, power consumption and implementation complexity when compared to current side-by-side implementations for these two technologies. The second technique, called "Prime-IP", can be implemented with, and enhance, any routing protocol. During the route discovery process, Prime-IP enables any node on a wireless mesh network (WMN) to dynamically select the best available route on the network. Prime-IP proposes a novel recursive process, based on prime numbers addressing, to accumulate knowledge for nodes beyond the “neighbouring nodes”, and to determine the sequence of all the “intermediate nodes” used to form the route