Quality of Service Scheduling for 802.16 Broadband Wireless Access Systems

IEEE 802.16, the specification for fixed, portable and even mobile broadband wireless access (BWA) systems, is promising to support heterogeneous classes of traffic with differentiated quality of service (QoS). The proposed medium access control (MAC) protocol defines a wide variety of mechanisms for bandwidth allocation and QoS provision. However, the details of how to schedule traffic are left unspecified so that the vendor may differentiate their product through implementation. In this paper, a new and efficient QoS scheduling strategy based on the hierarchical and distributed architecture is proposed for 802.16 BWA systems. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed scheduling architecture can provide QoS guarantees for all types of traffic as defined in the standard