Fairness-based scheduling algorithm for time division duplex mode IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless access systems

IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless access standard specifies four types of services to satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements of multimedia applications. How to design a scheduling algorithm is an open issue. Manufacturers can implement their own efficient scheduling algorithm depending on their requirement. There are a lot of scheduling algorithms that have been proposed. No matter these scheduling algorithms propose a hierarchical structure with strict priority or one-level scheduling mechanism, which is based conceptually on the round-robin approach, they do not consider an important factor: fair. The authors introduce a fair strategy algorithm for IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless access standard. The proposed algorithm applies a fair strategy to utilise the system bandwidth, achieve the QoS requirements of high-priority service flows and reduce starvations of low-priority service flows. The simulation studies show that the proposed scheduling algorithm provides a flexible way to utilise the system bandwidth.