Performance evaluation of various WiMAX schedulers under triple play services

IEEE 802.16 based Worldwide interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is a Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) technology that supports various real time multimedia applications (voice and video) as well as non real time data applications such as file transfer and email. The Quality Of Service (QoS) requirements of these triple play services are satisfied by various MAC layer schedulers that differentiate real time and non real time applications by division of traffic into five service classes, admission control and scheduling the order of packet transmission. In this paper major homogeneous scheduling algorithms are evaluated for QoS metrics (average throughput, average delay, and average jitter) and fairness to discover their suitability and their shortcomings for particular triple play service application. Simulation results reveal that no single scheduling algorithm satisfies QoS requirements of all applications. Therefore designing an optimal WiMAX scheduling algorithm is still an active area of research.