A joint traffic scheduling and slot allocation algorithm for mobile WiMAX networks

The IEEE 802.16e standard provides a high degree of flexibility for setting up and operating mobile WiMAX networks in metropolitan environments. While the standard supports differentiated Quality of Service (QoS), crucial functions such as traffic scheduling and slot allocation are left as open issues to the research community. This paper focuses on these two features, that consist an NP-Hard problem, and provides an integrated solution. The key component of the proposal is the “Colored OFDMA Frame Registry Tree Scheduler” (CO-FRTS) that achieves QoS-aware resource allocation by using an advanced tree structure to prepare the creation of time frames, and reduce processing requirements. An extended simulation model reveals the improved performance of the proposed solution, compared to other competent proposals.