An Enhanced Weighted Fair Queuing Scheduling for WIMAX Using QualNet

IEEE 802.16e based WIMAX is a promising technology for broadband wireless access (BWA) because of its high scalability, large coverage area, high data rates and low cost of system deployment. Unlike wireless Local Area Networks (LANs), WIMAX network supports Quality of Service (QoS) to different types of network traffic and has introduced several mechanisms at Medium Access Control (MAC) layer to provide guaranteed services for real time and non-real time applications. One of the main mechanisms is scheduling algorithm, which holds important role to manage and allocate resources to all users to meet QoS criteria such as delay and throughput. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) scheduling algorithm and Opportunistic Weighted Fair Queuing (OWFQ). We proposed an enhanced opportunistic based WFQ scheduling algorithm called channel and duration aware WFQ (cd-WFQ). The algorithm reduces the average delay by giving priority to packet with longer queuing duration. Through extensive simulations using Qualnet Simulator, we show that our proposed algorithm performs better in terms of average delay and fairness compared to OWFQ.