Performance evaluation of scheduling schemes for fixed broadband wireless access systems

The IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless access system (BWA) offers the advantage of fast deployment and cost-effective solution to the last-mile wireless connection problem. For mass adoption and large scale deployment of BWA system, it must support quality of service (QoS) for real-time and high bandwidth applications. The IEEE 802.16 standard defines the QoS signaling framework and various types of service flows, but the actual QoS mechanisms such as packet scheduling algorithms for these service flows are unspecified in the standard. We evaluate the performance of the various packet scheduling algorithms and also propose an efficient scheduling algorithm based on the transmission opportunity given to each station to support QoS in IEEE 802.16 standard. We show that the proposed scheduler provides improved performance in terms of mean delay and average system throughput compared to the other scheduling schemes through extensive simulations.