Design of the Cross-Layer QoS Framework for the IEEE 802.16 PMP Networks

Abstract

As one of the promising techniques in Broadband Wireless Access (BWA), IEEE 802.16 also namely WiMax provides wide-area, high-speed, and non-line-of-sight wireless transmission to support multimedia services. Four service types are defined in the specification of IEEE 802.16 for QoS support. In order to achieve end-to-end multimedia services, 802.16 QoS must be well integrated with IP QoS. In this paper, we propose a framework of cross-layer QoS support in the IEEE 802.16 network. Two novel mechanisms are proposed in the framework for performance improvement: Fragment Control and Remapping. Fragment Control handles the data frames that belong to the same IP datagram in an atomic manner to reduce useless transmission. Remapping is concerned with the mapping rules from IP QoS to 802.16 QoS and is designed to reduce the impact of traffic burstiness on buffer management. Simulation study has shown that the proposed scheme has higher goodput and throughput, and lower delay than the contrast.