IEEE 802.16 Mesh Schedulers: Issues and Design Challenges

IEEE 802.16 mesh mode defines three types of resource scheduling: coordinated centralized, coordinated distributed, and uncoordinated distributed. While the standard defines the required procedures and messages for each scheduler, it does not offer encouraging means to provide performance, reliability, or QoS. In this article we outline the issues of IEEE 802.16 mesh schedulers. We also survey representative proposals and qualitatively evaluate them against these issues. More critically, we identify key challenges that have not been addressed so far in the literature to motivate work in this area of research.