Adaptive QoS provision for IEEE 802.16e BWA networks based on cross-layer design

This article proposes an integrated framework for adaptive QoS provision in IEEE 802.16e broadband wireless access networks based on cross-layer design. On one hand, an efficient admission control (AC) algorithm is proposed along with a semi-reservation scheme to guarantee the connection-level QoS. First, to guarantee the service continuity for handoff connections and resource efficiency, our semi-reservation scheme considers both users’ handoff probability and average resource consumption together, which effectively avoids resource overreservation and insufficient reservation. For AC, a new/handoff connection is accepted only when the target cell has enough resource to afford both instantaneous and average resource consumption to meet the average source rate request. On the other hand, a joint resource allocation and packet scheduling scheme is designed to provide packet-level QoS guarantee in term of “QoS rate“, which can ensure fairness for the services with identical priority level in case of bandwidth shortage. Particularly, an enhanced bandwidth request scheme is designed to reduce unnecessary BR delay and redundant signaling overhead caused by the existing one in IEEE 802.16e, which further improves the packet-level QoS performance and resource efficiency for uplink transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed approach not only balances the tradeoff among connection blocking rate, connection dropping rate, and connection failure rate, but also achieves low mean packet dropping rate (PDR), small deviation of PDR, and low QoS outage rate. Moreover, high resource efficiency is ensured.