Performance of packet voice transmission using IEEE 802.16 protocol

Abstract

The IEEE 802.16 standard defines three types of scheduling services for supporting real-time traffic, unsolicited grant service (UGS), real-time polling service (rtPS), and extended real-time polling service (ertPS). In the UGS service, the base station (BS) offers a fixed amount of bandwidth to a subscriber station (SS) periodically, and the SS does not have to make any explicit bandwidth requests. The bandwidth allocation in the rtPS service is updated periodically in the way that the BS periodically polls the SS, which makes a bandwidth request at the specified uplink time slots and receives a bandwidth grant in the following downlink subframe. In the ertPS service, the BS keeps offering the same amount of bandwidth to the SS unless explicitly requested by the SS. The SS makes a bandwidth request only if its required transmission rate changes. In this article we study the performance of voice packet transmissions and BS resource utilization using the three types of scheduling services in IEEE 802.16-based backhaul networks, where each SS forwards packets for a number of voice connections. Our results demonstrate that while the UGS service achieves the best latency performance, the rtPS service can more efficiently utilize the BS resource and flexibly trade-off between packet transmission performance and BS resource allocation efficiency; and appropriately choosing the MAC frame size is important in both the rtPS and ertPS services to reduce packet transmission delay and loss rate