Effective Bandwidth Allocation for WiMAX Mesh Network

The aim of this paper is to reduce the media access delay in a WiMAX mesh network. We observe that as the number of subscriber stations (SS) in a neighborhood increases, the processes of transmission opportunity (TO) competition and 3way handshake are easy to fail. This may degrade transmission efficiency and increase packet transmission delay. Besides, the minislot allocation defined in the WiMAX mesh mode may cause many lower priority services reserve earlier minislots than that of higher priority services like rtPS. This may cause great negative impact on delay-sensitive traffic. In this paper, we design a QoS classifier to enqueue packets according to different QoS service classes, present a dynamic holdoff exponent mechanism to reduce control subframe delay, and propose a Neighborhood-Based Minislot Allocation (NBMA) mechanism to reduce data subframe delay. Simulations show that the proposed methodology outperforms that of IEEE 802.16 and Baye’s DynExp in delay, jitter and throughput.