Fairness resource allocation and scheduling for IEEE 802.16 Mesh networks

The IEEE 802.16 standard provides a scheme for creating multi-hop relay networks, which can be deployed as a high speed wide area wireless network at low cost. Although the standard defines signaling mechanisms in mesh mode, however, it doesn’t specify wireless resource management in the protocol. In this paper, we address the problem of resource allocation with the goal of providing fairness access to wireless channel for all the nodes as well as high network throughput in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. We first define node’s unsatisfactory index and throughput function. Then, a multi-objective programming formulation is proposed for optimizing network performance. Accordingly, a dynamic programming based resource allocation and scheduling algorithm is presented to provide an optimal resource allocation to achieve fairness among different nodes as well as high network throughput in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm significantly provides both fairness of channel access and optimal network throughput. Index items—resource allocation; dynamic programming; spatial reuse; IEEE 802.16 mesh networks