Cross-Layer QoS Framework in the IEEE 802.16 Network

To support multimedia service with the broadband wireless access (BWA), the IP layer QoS is one of the keys to success. The IEEE 802.16 technology provides the wide area, high speed and non-light-of-sight wireless network. In the standard, the layer 2 technology of the IEEE 802.16 supports the QoS service with four service types. To improve the performance of the IEEE 802.16 network, we should consider how both the IP layer QoS and 802.16 QoS cooperate. In this paper, we propose a framework of cross-layer QoS support in the IEEE 802.16 network. Two novel mechanisms are proposed in the framework for performance improvement: fragment control and remapping. Fragment control handles the data frames that belong to the same IP datagram in an atomic manner to reduce useless transmission. Remapping is concerning about the mapping rules from IP QoS to 802.16 QoS and is designed to reduce the impact of traffic burstiness on buffer management. Simulation study has shown that the proposed scheme has higher goodput and throughput than the contrast.