Design and implementation of a WiMAX analyzer (情報ネットワーク) Design and Implementation of a WiMAX Analyzer

To test and troubleshoot a WiMAX network, the information in the IP header is not enough and hence, a deeper packet inspection is required to understand the various TLV (Type-Length-Value) definitions, EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) authentication methods and data encapsulation protocols over the various open interfaces or reference points. This paper presents a new WiMAX analyzer, suitable for analyzing commercial WiMAX service networks and capable of providing not only a comprehensive analysis of the WiMAX ASN control protocols but also data plane analysis. It is implemented as a plugin module of Wireshark. The existing Wireshark's wimaxasncp dissector cannot decode the additional TLVs defined by the progressive evolution of IEEE 802.16 standard suite, does not recognize some important message types in the Message Header, has not implemented a decoder for WiMAX data plane transport encapsulation of user payloads (GRE encapsulations over the interfaces R3, R4 and R6) and EAP payload TLVs. Our analyzer solves all these flaws of the existing Wireshark implementation and thus, can provide operators with a comprehensive IP network analysis including WiMAX protocols.