A proposal to aggregate bandwidth request for WiMAX

The IEEE 802.16 standard is one of the BWA (Broadband Wireless Access) standards, which could provide Quality of Service (QoS) support to applications with end-to-end delay, jitter and/or maximum loss rate requirements. Its Medium Access Control (MAC) layer is centralized basis, where the Base Station (BS) is responsible for assigning the needed bandwidth for each Subscriber Station (SS). To do that the BS needs to have the knowledge about the bandwidth requirements of each connection, obtaining this information through some request mechanisms defined by the standard, which are Protocol Data Unit (PDU) basis, that is, one request will be made for each PDU enqueued and wait for being transmitted. In this paper, we propose to change the request mechanism, and not request on the basis of the Head-Of-Line PDU (HOL-PDU), but on the basis of the total queue size. We show that when the requests carrying total queue size information (case called aggregate mode) the overhead is reduced and the throughput is increased with respect to when the requests are PDU basis.