Supporting differentiated services in wireless access networks

Recent developments on the wireless communication technology have brought much innovativeness to make wireless access networks, e.g. WiMAX systems, to be able to compete with the wired access networks with much more bandwidth. QoS service provisioning is an important issue for deploying such networks. The IEEE 802.16d standard has specified the services should be provided at the medium access control (MAC) layer in WiMAX networks. However, it has left a wide space for research to develop and implement those specified services. In this paper, the issue of differentiated service provisioning will be addressed with the non-real-time polling service in WiMAX systems. The proposed solution has been designed to have an ability to accommodate integrated traffic in the networks with effective scheduling schemes. A series of simulation experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed hierarchical scheduling algorithm. The results reveal that the proposed solution performs effectively to the integrated traffic composed of messages with or without time constraints and achieves proportional fairness among different types of traffic.