Analysis of Co-existence between IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 Systems

Both IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 standards have become widespread throughout the world in license-exempt spectrum specifically in the 5 GHz band. However there is a problem in that the two standards are not designed to co-exist in close proximity together on the same or overlapping channels. In this paper an initial analysis of the performance degradation for co-existing IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 systems is presented. Analysis is carried out at the medium access control (MAC) layer by means of an event model based simulation tool. The results show that in co-existence scenarios the performance of both systems will degrade severely and as a result spectrum efficiency can drop to close to zero