Slot fair scheduling for real-time applications on uplink of WiMAX networks

We address an issue of scheduling for uplink realtime flows in WiMAX networks. Real-time flows require hard delay and throughput guarantees. Thus, each packet has a strict deadline and the packets delayed beyond their respective deadlines are dropped. Real-time applications can sustain some loss gracefully. Alternatively, they require some minimum throughput guarantee. Most of the existing scheduling schemes for WiMAX networks are either designed to optimize long term performance (without considering packet drops on account of deadline violations) or require packet level information for scheduling and thus are suitable for downlink flows. Hence, we propose a simple scheduling scheme based on the concept of slot fairness. We evaluate the proposed scheme using extensive simulations and show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes in terms of fairness and system throughput.