FEBA: A Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm for Service Differentiation in IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks

Abstract

Abstract-In wireless mesh networks, the end-to-end throughput of traffic flows depends on the path length, i.e., the higher the number of hops, the lower becomes the throughput. In this paper, a fair end-to-end bandwidth allocation (FEBA) algorithm is introduced to solve this problem. FEBA is implemented at the medium access control (MAC) layer of single-radio, multiple channels IEEE 802.16 mesh nodes, operated in a distributed coordinated scheduling mode. FEBA negotiates bandwidth among neighbors to assign a fair share proportional to a specified weight to each end-to-end traffic flow. This way traffic flows are served in a differentiated manner, with higher priority traffic flows being allocated more bandwidth on the average than the lower priority traffic flows. In fact, a node requests/grants bandwidth from/to its neighbors in a round-robin fashion where the amount of service depends on both the load on its different links and the priority of currently active traffic flows. If multiple channels are available, they are all shared evenly in order to increase the network capacity due to frequency reuse. The performance of FEBA is evaluated by extensive simulations. It is shown that wireless resources are shared fairly among best-effort traffic flows, while multimedia streams are provided with a differentiated service that enables quality of service.

Ubiquitous fair bandwidth allocation for multimedia traffic on a WiMAX mesh network with multi-channels

“…In other words, there is no need to reestablish the connection due to the link being stable enough. Furthermore, the same assumption has been made in various published studies with similar setting (Cicconetti et al, 2009;. Therefore, the above assumption could be reasonably accepted.…”

“…Therefore, WiMAX will easily be able to accommodate the various multimedia requirements even more so than other WMN technology such as 802.11s (802.11s draft indicates the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) has the ability to accommodate classes of services.). Furthermore, this field enables QoS for various LANs through 802.11d (Cicconetti et al, 2009;IEEE 802.1D (2004)., 2004), thus QoS through an 802.16 WMN should also be achievable. Therefore in this study, we implemented the 3 bit field in WiMAX to work with NS2 WiMAX model.…”

“…However, in order for utilizing this potential of improving throughput rate in multimedia traffic, the existing Fair Queue Indexing schedulers are somewhat deficient. They have known lack of consideration for multimedia traffic and proportionally distribute the service for the traffic flow (Cicconetti C., Akyildiz et al, 2007;Cicconetti et al, 2009). It is because the existing Fair Queue Indexing schedulers assume so-called "backloggedsituation" where packets arrive continuously.…”

TMAC: Timestamp-Ordered MAC for CSMA/CA Wireless Mesh Networks

“…Instead, it establishes priority scheduling for transmitting data packets at each node according to the local condition. The use of priority scheduling has also been investigated in the literature [12]- [14], [16], aiming to enforce service differentiation and ensure QoS. This is made possible by taking advantage of backoff increment functions or interframe spacing [13], [14].…”

“…TMAC uses the packet age as the priority metric to resolve the above deficiency. Similar to [12], [17], TMAC uses request/grant control messages to achieve higher throughput and fairness. This paper is organized as follows: In Section II, we introduce TMAC and describe its various functional blocks.…”