Rising demand for multimedia applications and mobile usage requires new paradigm to shift voice-oriented cellular architecture into data-oriented networks in order to serve bandwidth hungry packet based applications which include but not limited to multimedia gaming, mobiTV, streaming media, P2P, etc. Data oriented network requires 20-fold fatter air link and backhaul as compared to typical voice communication.

To meet this demand, the next generation networks considers OFDMA with MIMO support for air link and all-IP end-to-end system for backhaul at the behest of lower OPEX and CAPEX requirement of operators. These two coalesce in WiMAX.