Proposal and Evaluation of a Fuzzy Logic-Driven Resource Allocation Mechanism

Growth of mobile-based applications and traffic on web has made the role of schedulers in communication networks very challenging. The continuous pressure asserted by these applications is so large that even versatile WiMAX networks are facing stiff challenges in fair distribution of resources to these real- and non-real-time applications. Maintenance of fairness and flagrant quality of service levels among various applications is only possible with adaptive and intelligent scheduling mechanism. Design of such system is only possible if artificial intelligence is embedded in base station scheduler. This paper proposes mechanism for allocation of resources in WiMAX networks utilizing fuzzy logic principles. The proposed mechanism guarantees that latency and throughput requirements of real- and non-real-time traffic classes are met. Variations in incoming traffic have been exploited and used in decision making for offering bandwidth to maintain effective performance levels for all traffic classes. The proposed scheduler considers requests from subscribers and exploits powers of fuzzy logic to extract new weights for queues serving various traffic classes in a WiMAX network on the basis of most recent values of latency, throughput and share of traffic. The scheduling framework has been rigorously tested by performing versatile experiments for ensuring quality of service levels under hard hitting conditions. Fairness of scheduler has also been explored and results obtained are quite promising.