Enhancing MAC IEEE 802.16 Voice Support with Statistical Multiple Access for UMTS Integration

With the growing deployments of UMTS/HSDPA and recently WiMAX, the integration of these two broadband radio networks becomes an important challenge. However, the convergence of UTRAN and IEEE 802.16 as a radio access network is still limited. In this paper we propose a simple adaptation in WiMAX to enhance voice over IP support for end to end telephonic applications between UMTS and WiMAX. Our goal is to allow an operator to propose UMTS service via an 802.16 radio access network or UTRAN as well. First, we super-framed the 802.16 frame to enhance AMR codec compatibility. In addition, we use ON/OFF periods detection of voice sources to decrease the bandwidth allocated for the same number of calls. We then take advantage from the WiMAX uplink frame structure and from the loss tolerance of voice. Performance evaluation (analytical and simulation) is given to illustrate the benefits of our proposal.