A Bandwidth Negotiation Scheduling for Prioritized Traffic in MMR Networks

This paper presents a bandwidth-negotiation scheduling (BNS) for 802.16j MMR networks. The proposed BNS not only can allocate adequate bandwidth for UGS, rtPS, nrtPS, and BE in sequence of priority levels, but also can invoke negotiation between access and relay zones when the remaining bandwidth is insufficient to meet the minimum bandwidth requirement of rtPS or nrtPS. Besides, our BNS scheme can avoid BE starvation by earning the extra bandwidth from the nrtPS whose allocated bandwidth is more than its minimum requirement. We express the minimum bandwidth requirements of rtPS, nrtPS, and BE in terms of their respective QoS constraints. Through multi-dimensional Markov formulation, we evaluate the performance of the BNS and compare it with a fixed-zone-boundary scheme. Analytical results have shown that our proposed BNS can effectively differentiate prioritized traffic and significantly improve the system bandwidth utilization especially when the delay constraint for rtPS is increased.