A joint utility scheduler and SDMA Resource Allocation for Mobile WiMAX networks

In this paper a jointly utility packet scheduler and SDMA-based Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) architecture is proposed under the framework of Mobile WiMAX networks. Besides of time and frequency domains, users can be assigned spatial beams for information transfer, provided the degradation in signal quality for users already assigned slots in the map of resources, with different spatial beams is not affected to the point of compromising the user satisfaction for the quality of service. Performance evaluation of the proposed architecture is undertaken by means of System Level Simulations for a realistic network layout, fully compatible with the IEEE802.16e standard. Performance is evaluated by means of the percentage of satisfied users for a given range of the amount of active users in the system. Simulations with the Full Queue traffic mode are performed in order to estimate the gains in cell capacity, achieved with the SDMA-based DRA, over a simpler non-SDMA-based DRA.