Wimax standards and Security The Wimax

2.6 IEEE 802.16f
IEEE 802.16’s Network Management Study Group was created in August 2004. Its scope of work was to define a management information base (MIB) for the MAC and PHY, and associated management procedures. The working group approved 802.16f amendment that provides MIB for fixed broadband wireless access system in September 2005.
IEEE 802.16f (IEEE NetMan, 2005b) provides a management reference model for 802.16-2004 based networks. The model consists of a network management system (NMS), managed nodes, and service flow database. The BS and managed nodes collect the required management information and provide it to NMSs via management protocols, such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) over the secondary management connec- tion defined in 802.16-2004. IEEE 802.16f is based on the SNMP version 2 (SNMPv2), which is backward compatible with SNMPv1. 802.16f provides optional support for SNMPv3.



2.7 IEEE 802.16i
IEEE 802.16i project was initiated in December 2005 within the Network Man- agement Study Group to amend or supersede 802.16f. 802.16i is currently in its early phase, the predraft stage. The scope of 802.16i is to provide mobil- ity enhancements to 802.16 MIB to the MAC layer, PHY layer, and associated management procedures. It uses protocol-neutral methodologies for network management to specify resource models and related solution sets for the man- agement of devices in a multivendor 802.16 mobile network (IEEE NetMan, 2006b).



2.8 IEEE 802.16g
IEEE 802.16g (IEEE NetMan, 2005a) project was initiated in August 2004 within the Network Management Study Group. The scope of 802.16g is to produce procedures and service amendments to 802.16-2004 and 802.16e-2005; provide network management schemes to enable interoperable

and efficient management of network resources, mobility, spectrum; and standardize management plane behavior in 802.16 fixed and mobile devices. 802.16g defines a generic packet convergence sublayer (GPCS) as upper layer protocol-independent packet convergence sublayer that supports multiple protocols over 802.16 air interface. GPCS was designed to facilitate connection management by passing information from upper layer protocols without a need to decode their headers. This is achieved by allowing the upper layer protocols to explicitly pass information to the GPCS service access point (SAP) and map the information to the proper MAC connection. GPCS pro- vides an optional way to multiplex multiple layer protocol types over the same

802.16 connection. GPCS is not meant to replace any convergence sublayer (CS) defined by other 802.16 standards or amendments.
Given that 802.16 devices may be part of a larger network, they require interfacing with entities for management and control purposes. 802.16g abstracts a network control and management system (NCMS) that interfaces with the BSs. 802.16g is only concerned with the management and con- trol interactions between MAC/PHY/CS layers of the 802.16 devices and the NCMS. NCMS consists of different service entities such as paging ser- vices, gateway and router services, network management multimedia session services, interworking services, synchronization services, data cache ser- vices, coordination services, management services, security services, network management services, and media-independent handover function services. These entities may be centralized or distributed across the network. The details of the various entities that form the NCMS as well as the protocols of NCMS are kept outside the scope of 802.16g. NCMS handles any necessary inter-BS coordination that allows 802.16 PHY/MAC/CS layers to be inde- pendent of the network and thus allow more flexibility on the network side. 802.16g is still under development. It is expected that 802.16g will be submitted for approval by the start of 2007.