Flexible resource allocation in IEEE 802.16 wireless metropolitan area networks

IEEE 802.16 is considered today as the most promising technology, to provide extension of wireless broadband communications into metropolitan environments. One of the main design challenges in 802.16 is the introduction of an efficient traffic scheduler that handles resource allocation in the wireless interface. This paper proposes such a scheduler, referred to as the "frame registry tree scheduler", that aims at providing differentiated treatment to data connections, based on their QoS characteristics. The scheduler uses a tree structure in order to prepare time frame creation and reduce processing needs at the beginning of each time frame. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduler can attain considerable improvement in terms of throughput and packet losses