WiMAXTM and IEEE 802.16

In this chapter we describe the main technical characteristics of the IEEE 802.16 standard.We go through the different layers and their architecture, but at the beginning we explain the main objectives of the standard and some political issues behind it. As it will be seen in the chapter we cannot simply skip physical layer details even though they are not really in the target of this book, because IEEE 802.16 has the very bad characteristic to work in a cross-layer design manner where everything ends up controlling the physical layer.