Per-flow sleep scheduling for power management in IEEE 802.16 wireless networks

Power management is a critical issue in IEEE 802.16 wireless networks. In the standard, a power saving class (PSC) of type II is defined to support real-time traffic flows. It allows a flow to switch periodically between active and sleep states to save energy. However, previous studies either consider adjusting start frames of PSCs by assuming that the PSCs are already given or assume one single PSC to accommodate all flows in a mobile station, thus leading to higher energy cost. This paper proposes two “per-flow” sleep scheduling schemes, which assign one PSC to each real-time flow according to its QoS parameters. This leads to less energy consumption, more efficient use of bandwidth, and more compact listening windows. We also prove that deciding whether a given scheduling problem is solvable can be reduced to a maximum matching problem, which is computationally tractable. Simulation results show that such a per-flow scheduling does perform much closer to the active ratio lower bound and achieve higher resource utilization than previous schemes.