Fairness strategy and scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.16 wireless access systems

IEEE 802.16 standards specify four types of services, while how to design an efficient scheduling algorithm remains an open issue. Manufacturers can implement their own scheduling algorithms depending on their specific requirements. There are a lot of scheduling algorithms proposed in the literature. Several scheduling algorithms propose hierarchical structures with strict priority or one-level scheduling mechanism. They are based conceptually on the round-robin approaches. However, they don't consider an important factor: fairness. In this paper we propose a fairness strategy algorithm for IEEE 802.16 broadband wireless access networks. The proposed algorithm applies a fairness strategy to utilize the system bandwidth, to achieve the QoS requirements of high priority service flows, and to reduce starvations of low priority service flows. The simulation studies show that the proposed scheduling algorithm provides a flexible way to utilize the system bandwidth.