978-1-5090-6122-8/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE A Comprehensive Study and Performance Based Evaluation on Routing Protocols of WiMAX Farzana Shabnam * , Aparna Saha, Rifat Binte Sobhan, Tanmoy Debnath Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, BRAC University Dhaka, Bangladesh fshabnam@bracu.ac.bd Abstract— Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) technology is a subdivision of the vast field of wireless communications, which breaks the restrictions of DSL, cable- modem or T1 infrastructure based wire line of our broadband Internet connections [1]. Wireless networking has become an important area of research in academic and industry. The four high-speed intensive applications such as high-speed data, video, voice and streaming media are being served properly by the WiMAX network, which overcomes the term digital divide. It has a number of spearhead applications with at-home and dynamic internet accessibility along with large geographical coverage and relatively low expense to pursuit. Routing overhead, unidirectional link support, delay, throughput, QoS support and multicast are the analysable terms by whom we can define the WiMAX protocols. To attain best use of this technology selection of suitable protocol is very important. In our paper, most imperative protocols of 802.16 WiMAX network called AODV, DSDV and OLSR is ventilated as well as further criticized in accordance with their performance on WiMAX where AODV is a reactive (on demand) protocol and both DSDV and OLSR are proactive. I. INTRODUCTION Broadband wireless access (BWA) is known as favourable salvation for ‘last mile’ access technology over cable–modem based connection and IEEE802.16 standard WiMAX serves BWA with a large geographical area, a huge quantity of subscriber and most importantly with maximum possible speed at the same time [1]. WiMAX towers established in different locations of the community consisting of transmitter and receiver, in short transceivers. WiMAX signal are sent back and forth to the towers which are connected to other n th devices like computer, mobiles anything that can receive ethernet connection like routers. Further, WiMAX has come to every one of us with many possibilities of using Internet in a cost effective way at the same time having a better Internet experience than the previous DSL, T1 or cable-modem oriented broadband Internet connections. Other great thing about WiMAX is the standard called the mobile WiMAx. By this facility, people on motion can get the access to the same WiMAX connection of intended towers that they all put together in mesh format. WiMAX actually fill in the gaped what we actually have in the DSL, cable and T-1. It also features with a minimum overhead for transmitting data, connection oriented wide area network, huge bandwidth, channel capacity with at most one hundred users with promising connection speed [2]. In addition to that, large ecosystem, low IPR cost, low cost devices, wireless link with microwave, licensed spectrum and point-to-point (P2MP) architecture are the advantages owe by WiMAX. It was initially designed to achieve 30 to 40 megabyte per second data rates where in 2011 it speeded up to 1Gbit/second. Different protocols of WiMAX are serving different criteria of wireless connections accordingly to improve the routing efficiency and it is required to select a suitable protocol, which will reduce the routing overhead due to rerouting instability problem. The WiMAX protocols are AODV, DSR, DSDV, OLSR, ZRP, LAR, LANMAR, STAR, DYMO, PAODV, CBRP, TORA, ODMRP, CAMP, and CBT so on [1]. Among them, we have selected three routing protocols named AODV, DSDV, OLSR to analyse the few categories like routing overhead, throughput, multicast route, delay etc. In the section (II), the subsections A, B and C describe the routing mechanism, discovery and maintenance of three different routing protocol: AODV, DSDV and OLSR. In the following section (III), the factors of analysis are described such as routing overhead process, unidirectional link support, average delay, throughput, QoS support, multicast and reactivity based on which preferable routing protocol should be chosen. At the very last before we conclude in section (IV), a performance comparison between the protocols AODV, DSDV and OLSR is elucidated along with a table. Finally, in section (V), we conclude our paper. Fig.1 Workflow of the paper