Performance evaluation of scheduling in IEEE 802.16 based wireless mesh networks

IEEE 802.16 employs TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) as the access method and the policy for selecting scheduled links in a given time slot will definitely impact the system performance. We propose a collision-free centralized scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.16 based Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) to provide high-quality wireless multimedia services. We design a relay strategy for the mesh nodes in a transmission tree, taking special considerations on fairness, channel utilization and transmission delay. We evaluated the proposed algorithm with four selection criteria through extensive simulations and the experimental results are instrumental for improving the performance of IEEE 802.16 based WMNs in terms of link scheduling. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first one on the centralized scheduling for IEEE 802.16 mesh mode that considers the relay model.