Downlink resource management for QoS scheduling in IEEE 802.16 WiMAX networks

IEEE 802.16, also known as WiMAX, has received much attention recently for its capability to support multiple types of applications with diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Beyond what the standard has defined, radio resource management (RRM) still remains an open issue, which plays an important role in QoS provisioning for different types of services. In this paper, we propose a downlink resource management framework for QoS scheduling in OFDMA based WiMAX systems. Our framework consists of a dynamic resource allocation (DRA) module and a connection admission control (CAC) module. A two-level hierarchical scheduler is developed for the DRA module, which can provide more organized service differentiation among different service classes, and a measurement-based connection admission control strategy is introduced for the CAC module. Through system-level simulation, it is shown that the proposed framework can work adaptively and efficiently to improve the system performance in terms of high spectral efficiency and low outage probability.