Wimax standards and Security The Wimax

The WiMAX Forum Certification Process

WiMAX products need to pass two stages in the testing process to gain certification—compliance (or conformance) testing and interoperability test- ing. Compliance testing ensures that the product complies (or conforms) with

the test specification set forth in the given system profile. Interoperability testing ensures that the subscriber units and the BSs from different vendors operate within the same network.

As the technology and user requirements change over time, the certification programs need to adapt to these changes. Therefore, the scope of certification expands over time with the addition of new test cases. The list of requirements as defined in the system profiles does not change to ensure backward com- patibility. The new test cases are introduced either to include new features in the certification process or to expand the coverage of the existing ones.
WiMAX certification testing will be performed in multiple releases and waves. Multiple releases are necessary to test the products as they evolve over time with new features or specifications. For each release, the procedure will test all the new features as well as previously tested features. Each release will be backward compatible with the previous releases. For example, release 3 testing will include testing of all requirements from release 1 and release 2. For each release, there will also be different waves of testing, which will involve the same tests but at different times with different vendors. For example, vendors A, B, and C perform release 1 wave 1 testing in month 1, while vendors D, E, and F perform release 1 wave 2 testing in month 3 [6].
Release 1 for fixed WiMAX covers only the mandatory features and includes testing for the air interface, network entry, dynamic services, and bandwidth allocation. Release 2 will introduce the following three optional modules:

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  Quality of service (QoS) support
  
• 
  Advance security with advanced encryption standard (AES)
  
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  Automatic repeat request (ARQ)
  

It is quite possible that a release 1 BS supports QoS, but this feature is not tested in release 1; therefore, interoperability, while possible, should not be expected.

3.