A packet scheduling scheme for broadband wireless networks with heterogeneous services

A frame-based packet scheduling scheme, the pinwheel scheduling (PWS) scheme, is proposed and investigated at the medium access control (MAC) layer in broadband wireless networks. The objective of the proposed scheduling scheme is to provide, respectively, low delay and low jitter for real-time traffic and short queue length for nonreal-time traffic. We have demonstrated in this paper that the proposed PWS scheme not only satisfies the packet-level QoS requirements but also has low implementation cost. As the number of constant bit rate (CBR) connections increases, variable bit rate (VBR) traffic would suffer a larger jitter, the PWS with modular strategy (PWS/MS) scheme is proposed to further enhance the PWS scheme. We also introduce two different slot-reuse strategies named real-time traffic first (RTF) and longest queue first (LQF), respectively, to improve the resource utilization. In order to demonstrate the performance of the PWS and PWS/MS schemes, comparisons are made with existing schemes such as the round-robin (RR) and weighted-round-robin (WRR) by using the OPNET software. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes are capable of maintaining the lowest delay and jitter for VBR and CBR traffic while not sacrificing the available bit rate (ABR) traffic.