Abdel Karim Al Tamimi, "Exponential Effective Signal to Noice Ratio Mapping (EESM) Computation for WiMAX Physical Layer," MS Thesis, Washington University in Saint Louis, May 2007, 70 pp.

Advisor: Professor Raj Jain.

WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) is being introduced as one of the major future key technologies for wireless broadband. Performance modeling and simulations are required to obtain the best performance from WiMAX deployments. In WiMAX, the channel is divided into thousands of orthogonal subcarriers resulting is what is called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). One of the major challenges in modeling WiMAX is to evaluate the channel quality and model the combined effect of interference on these subcarriers. EESM (Effective Exponential SINR Mapping) is a commonly used method to combine signal to interference and noise ratios (SINR) in such multi-carrier environments. EESM requires the use of a "beta" parameter that needs to be set correctly so that the channel model results in accurate block error rate (BLER) for a given modulation and coding scheme (MCS). In this thesis a simulation model of the WiMAX physical layer is implemented and several experiments are conducted to determine the beta values for a number of MCS used in WiMAX networks.

Complete thesis in Adobe Acrobat 3.0 Format