Scheduling solution for the IEEE 802.16 base station

The IEEE 802.16 standard defines a wireless broadband access network technology called WiMAX. It introduces several advantages, one of which is the support for QoS at the MAC level. To ensure meeting the QoS requirements, the 802.16 base station must run some algorithm to allocate slots between connections. This algorithm is not defined in the 802.16 specification but rather is open for alternative implementations. We propose a simple, yet efficient, solution that is capable of allocating slots based on the QoS requirements, bandwidth request sizes, and the 802.16 network parameters. To test the proposed solution, we have implemented the 802.16 MAC and PHY layers in the NS-2 simulator. Several simulation scenarios are presented that demonstrate how the scheduling solution allocates resources in various cases. According to the simulation results, the proposed scheduling solution ensures the QoS requirements of all 802.16 service classes. The solution shares free resources fairly and demonstrates work-conserving behaviour.