Performance Evaluation of WiMAX/WiFi Networks Whilst Streaming Video Conference Application

Abstract

Due to the fast development of technology, future communication and transmission are going to depend upon wireless networks. So the two technologies chosen in this project (WiMAX and WiFi) are examples of typical wireless networks. In today’s wireless communication systems there are challenges regarding wireless networks quality of service (QoS) issues like delay, delay variation, packet loss and throughput. The (QoS) faces problems by increasing the number of users, so there is need to study and evaluate those problems and find better solutions. The aim of the project is to evaluate the performance of WiMAX /WIFI networks by streaming a videoconference on OPNET simulation program and compare between the performance and capabilities of the two networks to find the best solutions in maintaining and deploying them. The two wireless networks are compared in different parameters for each one according to their reference model. The application used as main traffic is the videoconferencing in order to investigate the strength of each technology by increasing the number of users, other attributes in the simulation environment unchanged. Simulation results show that throughput is higher in WiMAX by 84.7% as the number of users increased, the traffic loss in WiFi is (64.4%) while in WiMAX is (92.7%) when the number of users is increasing.