A Novel QoS Scheduling Scheme in IEEE 802.16 Networks

An increasing interest in IEEE 802.16 networks has been witnessed due to the demonstrated unique features in offering quality of service (QoS) satisfaction and service differentiation. Efficient scheduling plays a key role in fulfilling these operational requirements and unique characteristics. Traditional scheduling schemes such as opportunistic scheduling and proportional fairness scheduling focuses on throughput maximization and fairness instead of service differentiation and QoS guarantee. In this paper, a novel scheduling scheme is proposed to provide the QoS satisfaction and service differentiation in terms of delay. The proposed scheme manipulates a new design parameter - the time window of throughput evaluation, to differentiate the delay performance of each queue. By embedding wireless channel condition of each queue into the preference metric, opportunistic scheduling can be properly realized by trading the delay performance. An analytical model is developed on inter-service time, queue length, and waiting time, and is verified through extensive simulation.