Servicing Best Effort Traffic Using nrtPS on Fixed WiMAX

IEEE 802.16 is a wireless metropolitan area broadband access technology which provides layer two service differentiation for many types of traffic flows. In this paper the transport of uplink best effort traffic from the subscriber to the base station is considered. The performance of best effort service class is analyzed and compared with non-real-time polling service class which can also be used for low priority flows such as file transfer and Web traffic. We propose performance enhancements and modifications to increase the efficiency of the nrtPS class. Namely using a dynamic polling period based on the activity on the connection, using dummy keep alive messages when inactive and releasing idle connections to conserve bandwidth.