Firstly

the developing actuality and constituting process of IEEE series standard 802.16 that is the base of the technology of the WiMAX are introduced in this paper.Simultaneously

the article places emphasis on the characteristic analysis of media access control layer and physical layer about IEEE 802.16. Secondly

IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 are compared detailed by the author that the former and the latter are respectively used to build broadband WLAN and WMAN. At the end of the article

the author depicts the application scene of the WiMAX and puts forward several piece of practical scheme tentatively. The auther also makes an outlook on the WiMAX.