Ubiquitous fair bandwidth allocation for multimedia traffic on a WiMAX mesh network with multi-channels

The WiMAX, also known as IEEE 802.16, provides a mechanism for deploying high-speed wireless mesh network, (an ubiquitous wireless network) in metropolitan areas. WiMAX technology can be used as “last mile ubiquitous” broadband connections to deliver streaming audio or video to clients. Thus, Quality of Service (QoS) is very important for WiMAX networks. Providing QoS in multi-hop WiMAX networks such as WiMAX mesh networks is challenging since the WiMAX mesh networks MAC is connectionless based and does not have proper support guarantees for QoS over multiple hops. As a result, multiple links can interfere with each other when they are scheduled at the same time. The scheduling function plays a crucial role in QoS support, and various algorithms have been proposed and analyzed. These analysis basically assume a backlogged situation evenly in all queues. However, multimedia traffic is bursty in nature, and the fairness of bursty traffic relative to continuous traffic has not been fully studied yet. Therefore, in this paper, we will discuss the potential unfairness that bursty traffic may be subjected to and propose a new frame-based packet scheduling algorithm. The scheduling is evaluated with multiple channels on WiMAX mesh nodes, which are operated in a distributed coordinated scheduling mode. Each wireless node has a single radio interface which is able to switch between multiple channels. We evaluated the performance of the proposed dynamic changing scheduling method by extensive simulations, and it was shown to provide fair bandwidth allocation while increasing the traffic performance by means of throughput.