An Efficient Bandwidth Management algorithm for WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) wireless network: EBM allocation algorithm

IEEE 802.16 WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) consists of five service classes with different priorities. The priority of real time traffic is higher than that of non-real time traffic. Since bandwidth is limited, it must be allocated in advance to guarantee the throughput of real time traffic in WiMAX network. But WiMAX standard does not provide any algorithm for dynamic allocation of bandwidth to these services. In this paper, a dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm for WiMAX called Efficient Bandwidth Management (EBM) is proposed. In EBM the bandwidth will be increased in the upcoming frames when the allocated bandwidth is not sufficient to transfer the data. On the other side if the allocated bandwidth is more, then the bandwidth will be decreased in the upcoming frames so that the other services can use this excess bandwidth. This bandwidth increase or decrease is proportional to the remaining data in the queue. EBM increase the throughput of real time traffic as the bandwidth is handled efficiently. The proposed algorithm is implemented in ns-2 and results are compared with traditional IEEE 802.16 WiMAX. The simulation results show that EBM algorithm gives better result for real-time traffic.