Quality of service differentiation support in WiMAX networks

Ubiquitous broadband Internet access is an important requirement to satisfy user demands and support a new set of real time services and applications. WiMAX, a broadband wireless access solution for wireless metropolitan area networks, covering large distances with high throughputs, is a promising technology for next generation networks. Nevertheless, for the successful deployment of WiMAX based solutions, quality of service (QoS) is a mandatory feature that must be supported. In this paper, the lack of QoS support for WiMAX in NS2- NIST software is addressed. A QoS framework, composed by a packet classification mechanism and a scheduler, has been specified and implemented on the simulator, providing service differentiation over WiMAX networks. Furthermore, in order to validate the developed solutions, a set of QoS oriented scenarios have been simulated and the obtained results show that the implemented model is able to efficiently differentiate between the different traffic classes defined in the WiMAX model.