WFICC: A new mechanism for provision of QoS and Congestion Control in WiMAX

In WiMAX architecture the base station lacks the mechanisms to avoid it from being overloaded, which can lead to degradation in the Quality of service (QoS) experienced by the users in the cell, as the large queue at buffer risk high delays and buffer overflow. Congestion avoidance is rarely considered in ensuring the QoS of wireless connections. Efforts are mainly aimed at reducing the overload once it has occurred or to ensure the provision of QoS under load conditions. In this paper we propose a mechanism namely WiMAX Fair Intelligent Congestion Control (WFICC) to avoid congestion at the base station. WFICC ensures that the traffic is scheduled in such a way that the base station output buffer operates at a target operating point, without violating the QoS requirements of connections. A detailed simulation study is performed in ns-2 to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed algorithm to meet the QoS requirements of different Class of Services (CoSs). The results have shown that the proposed WFICC algorithm enables the base station to avoid congestion and ensures the provision of QoS of different Class of Services (CoSs) in terms of throughput, fairness and packet delay.