Quality of Service Management in IEEE 802.16 Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks

In the last years the Metropolitan Area Networks (MAN) have increased their popularity and kept the interest of the most important research groups all over the world. Several standards have been published which represent the first step for developing metropolitan networks: IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) has taken a relevant role in reaching the goal of realizing a full-service network all over a urban and suburban area. This standard provide high data rate in a big covering range with low implementation costs, multi-traffic communication and the possibility of creating broadcast, multicast and mesh networks. The WiMAX networks can have a pre-defined structure, with a central Base Station (BS) covering a cell in which a variable number of Subscriber Stations (SS) could work, or a mesh distribution with SSs communicating together without BS participation. In this paper a QoS management model is proposed for a centralized structure in which the BS schedules the Best-Effort and VoIP traffics of several SSs.