QoS in WiMAX hybrid schedulers for heterogeneous traffic and their performance comparison

ABSTRACT

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), based on IEEE 802.16, provides first-mile wireless access for broadband users and is capable of satisfying the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of voice, video and data traffic (triple-play services). This paper proposes two WiMAX hybrid schedulers, developed by integration of homogeneous schedulers, for providing QoS to triple-play services. The Markovian model is solved analytically to derive various performance metrics, which are then compared with an existing scheduler. The splitting of FTP traffic, before scheduling, provides improved throughput as compared to the proposed first hybrid scheduler, making this an exclusive component of the proposed second hybrid scheduler. The results show that the second proposed model provides an improvement of mandatory QoS parameters; reduction in voice traffic mean queuing delay by 68.18%, and improvement in FTP traffic throughput by 67.27% as compared to the first designed model. The first considered scheduler gives high inter-class fairness; however, it does not provide satisfactory QoS performance. The proposed hybrid schedulers are better in overall performance than other schedulers proposed recently, as they not only satisfy the QoS demands of different types of services but also improve the fairness among services.

KEYWORDS:

• Hybrid schedulers
• Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) scheduling algorithms
• broadband wireless communication
• quality of service (QoS)
• markov chain
• analytical modelling
• performance evaluation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.