Energy Efficient Integrated Scheduling of Unicast and Multicast Traffic in 802.16e WMANs

In this paper we address a new problem that has not been addressed in the past: how to improve energy efficiency for both unicast and multicast services without violating QoS requirements of mobile stations in 802.16e wireless networks. We propose a scheduling set based integrated scheduling (SSBIS) algorithm to solve the problem. SSBIS partitions all the mobile stations into multicast Scheduling Sets and a unicast Scheduling Set on the principle of minimizing mobile stations´ energy consumptions by making use of the multicast transmission scheme and it adopts different scheduling policies based on the attributes of the Scheduling Sets to improve energy efficiency of the whole system. Numerical results show that SSBIS can result in a significant overall energy saving while at the same time guaranteeing the minimum data rates of mobile stations.