WiMAX - teknologi, funksjonelle egenskaper og sikkerhet

Today the infrastructures for electronic communication is developing tremendously. The tendency is that commercial and military infrastructures for electronic communication are converging, in case of both technology utilization and applications. Commercial communications technology will have a greater impact on the Norwegian Defence in times to come. With this background the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment will study some selected relevant commercial systems and technologies for electronic communication. In this report WiMAX is being described. WiMAX stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. WiMAX is a technology for broadband wireless access. There are two versions of the technology that is being deployed today. They are commonly called fixed and mobile WiMAX, and refer to the IEEE 802.16-2004 and IEEE 802.16e-2005 standards respectively. The most important property of the WiMAX-technologies is high spectrum utilization in very different environments. This report describes the physical layer, and particularly orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and multiple input multiple output antenna techniques. They are of special importance. Other topics in the report are the media access control layer and the network reference model developed by WiMAX Forum. Security and vulnerability, and location based services are of special relevance, and are therefore being described in more detail. At the end the status of deployment is reported.