A comparative simulation of mobile WiMAX physical layer performance for Zero-Force (ZF) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) channel equalizers

Abstract

Mobile WiMAX is a broadband wireless solution that enables convergence of mobile and fixed broadband network through a common wide area broadband radio access technology and flexible network architecture. The aim of this paper is the performance evaluation of 802.16e system using different channel equalizers at the receiver module for different communication and modulation technique for different bandwidth. We analyze the Symbol Error Rate (SER) of the wireless communication channel (SUI -3 channel with AWGN) for using zero-force (ZF) and Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) equalizers at FFT size 256, 512 and 1024, respectively for BPSK, QPSK, 16-QAM and 64-QAM modulation. The simulation includes symbol error rate versus signal to noise ratio performance predictions. In our simulation we use deterministic random number generator (RNG) algorithm to generate the random input value. It is concluded that the performance of the MMSE equalizer is comparable to or slightly better than the ZF equalizer. Key words: Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Symbol Error Rate (SER), zero force, Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE), bit error rate.