Radio-aware resource allocation architecture for QoS differentiation in WiMAX networks

One of the keys to the success of WiMAX is its capability of supporting traffic with heterogeneous quality of service (QoS) requirements. The current standard specifies the general QoS architecture for WiMAX but the design of the main building blocks (e.g., connection admission control, packet schedulers) is left up to the vendors' implementation. This gap motivates the paper that aims to design and analyse a channel-aware QoS framework for efficiently managing radio resources in a WiMAX network. The proposed architecture integrates the specifications of (1) a connection admission control module and a packet scheduler implemented at the base station (BS) to manage bandwidth requests from the subscriber stations (SSs), and (2) a scheduler at the SS that distributes the granted resources among the active data flows. Simulation results show that the proposed framework enables QoS differentiation and intra-class fairness, and demonstrate that a combined design of the BS and SS schedulers is necessary for effective QoS provisioning.