Quality of service support in IEEE 802.16 networks

During the last few years, users ail over the world have become more and more accustomed to the availability of broadband access. This has boosted the use of a wide variety both of established and recent multimedia applications. However, there are cases where it is too expensive for network providers to serve a community of users. This is typically the case in rural and suburban areas, where there is slow deployment (or no deployment at all) of traditional wired technologies for broadband access (e.g., cable modems, xDSL). In those cases, the most promising opportunity rests with broadband wireless access technologies, such as the IEEE 802.16, also known as WiMAX. One of the features of the MAC layer of 802.16 is that it is designed to differentiate service among traffic categories with different multimedia requirements. This article focuses on mechanisms that are available in an 802.16 system to support quality of service (QoS) and whose effectiveness is evaluated through simulation.     

Power-aware opportunistic downlink scheduling in IEEE 802.16 wireless networks

The IEEE 802.16 is a standard for fixed and mobile Broadband Wireless Access (BWA). In this paper, we deal with two key challenges of 802.16-based networks. First, terminals close to cell edge experience poor channel quality, due to severe path-loss and high interference from concurrent transmissions in nearby cells. To address this issue, we propose a framework based on a static partitioning of bandwidth into chunks with different transmission power levels. Terminals with impaired channel conditions can then benefit from being allocated a higher amount of transmission power than the others. Secondly, transmissions should be scheduled according to Quality of Service (QoS) requirements to keep users with real-time video or voice calls satisfied, while best-effort connections should fairly share the remaining capacity. To this aim, we propose a scheduling algorithm, called Power-aware Opportunistic Downlink Scheduling (PODS), that aims at meeting both the QoS and fairness requirements, while taking into account the different power levels of the bandwidth chunks. The performance of the proposed scheduler is assessed through detailed packet-level simulation in realistic scenarios and compared with well-known scheduling algorithms. Results confirm that PODS is able to exploit power boosting to provide real-time connections with the desired level of QoS, irrespectively of their MSs’ channel quality.     

FEBA: A Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm for Service Differentiation in IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks

In wireless mesh networks, the end-to-end throughput of traffic flows depends on the path length, i.e., the higher the number of hops, the lower becomes the throughput. In this paper, a fair end-to-end bandwidth allocation (FEBA) algorithm is introduced to solve this problem. FEBA is implemented at the medium access control (MAC) layer of single-radio, multiple channels IEEE 802.16 mesh nodes, operated in a distributed coordinated scheduling mode. FEBA negotiates bandwidth among neighbors to assign a fair share proportional to a specified weight to each end-to-end traffic flow. This way traffic flows are served in a differentiated manner, with higher priority traffic flows being allocated more bandwidth on the average than the lower priority traffic flows. In fact, a node requests/grants bandwidth from/to its neighbors in a round-robin fashion where the amount of service depends on both the load on its different links and the priority of currently active traffic flows. If multiple channels are available, they are all shared evenly in order to increase the network capacity due to frequency reuse. The performance of FEBA is evaluated by extensive simulations. It is shown that wireless resources are shared fairly among best-effort traffic flows, while multimedia streams are provided with a differentiated service that enables quality of service.     

A bandwidth request reiteration mechanism for IEEE 802.16 wireless networks

The IEEE 802.16 is a leading technology for Broadband Wireless Access (BWA), where a Base Station (BS) provides a set of Subscriber Stations (SSs) with first-mile network access. Each SS has multiple connections directed to the BS, which are assigned bandwidth on a demand basis. Specifically, the BS allocates part of the channel as request slots, which are accessed by best-effort connections in a random access manner to transmit bandwidth requests. Although bandwidth requests sent by different SSs may collide the standard does not specify an explicit acknowledgment mechanism. This, and the bandwidth being assigned by the BS to each SS as a whole, may lead to critical inconsistencies between the perception of the SSs’ requirements at the BS and the actual SSs’ requirements, which in turn may entail SS service disruption. While the standard suggests that an SS should regularly update the BS about the backlog of its connections, the algorithm to do so is left unspecified. In this paper we propose a simple, yet effective, mechanism to be employed by the SSs, called Bandwidth Request Reiteration (BR²), which prevents deadlock from occurring. Using detailed packet-level simulation, we compare BR² to an alternative approach based on timeout, and show that BR² achieves better performance, in terms of the average transfer delay, while it does not incur a significant additional overhead, in terms of MAC signaling.