Scheduling algorithm in a point-to-multipoint broadband wireless access network

Abstract

Point-to-multipoint broadband wireless access (BWA) is an attractive solution to provide advanced data services to users who do not have easy access to wireline data services. However, BWA will need to support delay sensitive services as users and applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Wireless packet scheduling is an important part of quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning in BWA. The biggest difficulty in wireless packet scheduling is the location-dependent channel errors. Channel condition independent fair scheme (CIF) (T.S. Eugene, et al., March 1998) uses explicit leading/lagging approach to compensate for the erroneous channel state, but is not able to satisfy both rapid convergent guaranteed throughput and fairness. In this paper, we propose to use the token bank fair queuing (TBFQ) scheduling algorithm as a QoS provisioning mechanism for an asymmetric broadband point-to-multipoint wireless LAN. We consider the throughput and fairness performance of TBFQ under location-dependent channel error condition with variable packet length. This work is an extension of our previous work in applying TBFQ in next generation cellular networks.