Uplink Scheduling Algorithms in IEEE 802.16 Broadband Wireless Access Systems: A Survey

Abstract

WiMAX is one of the most important broadband wireless technologies and is anticipated to be a viable alternative to traditional wired broadband techniques due to its cost efficiency. WiMAX supports multimedia applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), voice conference and online gaming. It is necessary to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guaranteed with different characteristics for Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) networks. However, the actual version of the standard does not define a Media Access Control (MAC) scheduling architecture in uplink as well as downlink direction. Efficient scheduling design is left for designers and developers and thus providing QoS for IEEE 802.16 BWA system is a challenge for system developers. The scheduling architecture must ensure good bandwidth utilization, maintain the fairness between users and respond to the constraints of some applications (i.e. video, voice). A good number of articles are available to analyze the performance of the standard. To analyze these studies, a survey based on the scheduling mechanism or method used in the different propositions is presented in this paper. Some studies are based on traditional algorithms and other studies use new methods and mechanisms that are proposed for the new standard in order to provide QoS.