Testbedding MIMO HSDPA and WiMAX

Abstract—Modern wireless communication systems employMIMO and feedback—two properties that make it especiallydifficult to measure the performance of such systems withreasonable effort in actual outdoor scenarios.In this paper, we will present a time, cost, and manpower effi-cient measurement approach to evaluate the throughput achievedby such systems. Summer/winter, large distance outdoor-to-indoor/outdoor, urban/alpine measurements have been carriedout to successfully test this approach. Exemplarily, we report onthe throughput gains (over TX power and base-station-antenna-rotation) of standard compliant 2x2 MIMO HSDPA and IEEE802.16-2004 WiMAX when, for example, employing improvedchannel coding methods. I. M OTIVATION Modern wireless communication systems rely on complexalgorithms to squeeze out the last bit of performance froma radio link. They do so by exploiting the characteristics of achannel in an ingenious way. In the end—although sometimesa good benchmark—it is not the BER or the theoreticallyachievable capacity that counts, but the throughput actuallyachieved by the system under investigation.Determining the throughput performance of ingenious trans-mission schemes, on the other hand, is a different story. Todo so, usually, the communication system is simulated in e.g.M