Discretionary bandwidth granting scheme for homogenous real-time applications

IEEE 802.16e is an advanced wireless access technology that provides high-speed data transmission in long distance and offers quality of service (QoS) to subscribers. The provisioning of QoS is one of the great features by IEEE 802.16 to support both real-time and non-real-time applications. In IEEE 802.16, the common part sublayer in the MAC layer is responsible for maintaining the QoS services. There are many functions in the common part sublayer; the most popular topics discussed by researchers are the uplink and downlink scheduling algorithms. Many discussions had been made and focused on these two classes of schedulers. Another equally important component but overlooked so far is the bandwidth request and grant module. Bandwidth request and grant module arbitrates the amount of bandwidth to be granted, besides handling the bandwidth requests. This bandwidth request and grant process has always been developed in a conventional way, and its importance has been underestimated. In addition, the bandwidth distribution within a same service class or category also attracted little attention thus far. Many algorithms for interclass scheduling have been studied and proposed but not as much for intraclass scheduling. However, in bandwidth request and grant process, constraints on the required knowledge by the schedulers limit the intraclass scheduling algorithms to be applied onto them. We view the bandwidth request and grant process as an important part of the QoS architecture. In this paper, we proposed a new bandwidth granting scheme for the bandwidth request and granting process, which enables bandwidth to be fairly granted based on the necessity to all the requests from the same service class or category. By applying our scheme, significant improvements have been observed and recorded. Experiment results have proven and confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed scheme as compared to the conventional scheme.