Packet Scheduling Using Bidirectional Concurrent Transmission in WiMAX Mesh Networks

Performance of wireless mesh networks can be greatly improved by employing spatial reuse with concurrent transmissions. However, most current research works on centralized scheduling for WiMAX mesh networks are based on a unidirectional concurrent scheme, i.e., transmissions of uplinks and downlinks are considered separately. In this paper, we analyze the interference model of IEEE 802.16 TDMA mesh networks and propose a bidirectional concurrent transmission model. We propose a packet scheduling problem to formulate centralized scheduling in WiMAX mesh networks with bidirectional concurrent transmission, and make simulations to verify the effect of it with various scheduling algorithms. Experiment results reveal that comparing to unidirectional transmission, bidirectional transmission can effectively minimize the number of timeslots required to transmission packets.