Efficient routing and centralized scheduling algorithms for IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks

Abstract

An IEEE 802.16 wireless system can provide broadband wireless access to subscriber stations and operate in mesh mode. The communication between a subscriber station and a base station can pass through one or more intermediate subscriber stations. The IEEE 802.16 standard provides a centralized scheduling mechanism that supports contention-free and resource-guarantee transmission services in mesh mode. However, the corresponding algorithm to this schedule is quite primitive in the standard. In this paper, we propose a more efficient way to realize this schedule by maximizing channel utilization. Our designs are divided into two phases: routing and scheduling. First, a routing tree topology is constructed from a given mesh topology by our proposed tree construction algorithm. Secondly, we allocate channel resources to the edges in the routing tree by our proposed scheduling algorithm. To further support the quality-of-service schedule, we extend our designs by addressing some issues such as service class, admission control and fairness. Simulation results show the superiority of our proposed algorithms over others. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.