Wireless systems and standards are now progressing toward the implementation of fifth generation (5G) to combat with an expected and explosive growth of demands of wireless services in future. Consequently, wireless interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology at its physical layer is being utilized for the uplink and downlink transmission to afford the high spectral efficiency in fading environments. However, the 5G implementation requires additional improvements to meet the futuristic stress. This work proposes an innovative solution that combines WiMAX system with multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology to meet the required elevated data rates as desired by the growing application needs of 5G. MIMO is capable to fulfil the vision of 5G to realize a huge number of base stations equipped with a large number of terminals to be served in the same time-frequency resource without severe inter-user interference. Furthermore, the proposed system is demonstrated incorporation with discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and fractional Fourier transforms (FrFTs) in the physical layer of the WiMAX system. The evaluated outcomes exemplify a considerable improvement in bit error rate (BER) performance in contrast with the earlier reported work.