Scheduling Mechanisms

The WiMAX technology, based on the IEEE 802.16 standards (IEEE, 2004) (IEEE, 2005), is a solution for fixed and mobile broadband wireless access networks, aiming at providing support to a wide variety of multimedia applications, including real-time and non-real-time applications. As a broadband wireless technology, WiMAX has been developed with advantages such as high transmission rate and predefined Quality of Service (QoS) framework, enabling efficient and scalable networks for data, video, and voice. However, the standard does not define the scheduling algorithm which guarantees the QoS required by the multimedia applications. The scheduling is the main component of the MAC layer that helps assure QoS to various applications (Bacioccola, 2010). The radio resources have to be scheduled according to the QoS parameters of the applications. Therefore, the choice of the scheduling algorithm for the WiMAX systems is very important. There are several scheduling algorithms for WiMAX in the literature, however, studies show that an efficient, fair and robust scheduling algorithm for WiMAX systems is still an open research area (Soin et al., 2010) (Dhrona et al., 2009) (Cheng et al., 2010).