An adaptive polling algorithm with differentiation strategy in IEEE 802.16 multi-hop networks with IEEE 802.11e WLANs

WiMAX with wired infrastructure has been popularly deployed. However, due to the high cost of the construction and the maintenance of the infrastructure, researchers have focused their investigations on IEEE 802.16 wireless multi-hop networks with low cost and high scalability. With IEEE802.11e WLANs, which provide user-level QoS support for WLANs, the multi-hop networks of IEEE 802.16 using DiffServ can provide an excellent network architecture for QoS support. In the multi-hop networks, polling services for the bandwidth request and grant play an important role for a QoS guarantee for IEEE 802.11e clients. Thus, we propose an adaptive polling algorithm with differentiation strategy for unicast and multicast polling services in IEEE 802.16 multi-hop networks with IEEE 802.11e WLANs using DiffServ to provide a QoS guarantee. By simulating the polling algorithm and the DiffServ network architecture using the OPNET Modeler and analyzing bandwidth utilization and the number of clients with rejected bandwidth requests, we show that the novel polling algorithm provides excellent QoS support.