Prioritization of delay intolerant secure web traffic in WiMAX

According to different priority based services, IEEE 802.16e WiMAX standard classifies packets as UGS, RTPS, eRTPS, nRTPS, BE. The standard treats all packets generated while browsing the internet as delay tolerant packets and classifies them as Best Effort (BE) packets. This includes BE packets generated while browsing secure websites. However, secure transactions are governed by time constraints as they take place within a secure session. Expiration time for secure sessions varies based on application/server. For high priority Secure Sessions the expiration time can be very short. In a highly congested network a Subscriber Station (SS) may not get enough BE bandwidth and hence might not be able to transmit these secure and delay sensitive packets leading to session termination which will lead to failed transactions resulting in unsatisfied users. In this paper we propose classification of Secure-HTTP and Secure-WAP packets as RTPS packets and moving them to RTPS queue so that they receive higher priority. The simulation results reveal that when the system contains 20 SS with one session per SS in progress, and when Secure-HTTP/Secure-WAP packets are treated as priority packets like RTPS, there is an increase in throughput for secure packets by 340 Kbps and decrease in delay by about 1.54 seconds per SS.