IEEE 802.16 based last mile broadband wireless military networks with quality of service support

Future Department of defense warfighting concepts leverage information superiority and will require vast improvements in information transfer in terms of higher bandwidth, Quality of Service (QoS) support and connection to a high speed backbone. The new IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless access system is a viable alternative that can meet such requirements. In addition, this network can be swiftly deployed to interconnect the military theater, emergency response, and disaster relief operations to the backbone. Due to the diverse multimedia traffic with different priorities and QoS requirements, it is a well know fact that it is imperative to provide QoS support in military networks. However, the IEEE 802.16 provides only signaling mechanisms, but does not specify any scheduling or admission control algorithms that ultimately provide QoS support. In this paper we introduce a new scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless access standard. The proposed solution which is practical and compatible to the IEEE 802.16 standard, provides QoS support to different traffic classes. To the best of our knowledge this is the first such algorithm. The simulation studies show that the proposed solution includes QoS support for all types of traffic classes as defined by the standard. We have shown the relationship between traffic characteristics and its QoS requirements and the network performance. This study will help network architects to decide the system parameters as well as the kind of traffic characteristics for which the network can provide QoS support.