Centralized Resource Allocation for Multimedia Traffic in IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks

The IEEE 802.16 standard provides a high degree of flexibility for setting up and operating wireless broadband networks in metropolitan environments. The standard supports numerous capabilities, including mesh topologies and multimedia communications. In this paper, we study these two features by investigating how efficiently an IEEE 802.16 mesh network can treat distributed multimedia traffic by providing differentiated quality of service (QoS). A key component of the system is the ldquoenhanced frame registry tree schedulerrdquo (E-FRTS) that provides QoS-aware resource allocation using a tree structure to prepare the creation of time frames and reduce processing requirements at the beginning of each frame. Simulation results show that distributed multimedia traffic can be efficiently supported in mesh 802.16 networks, provided efficient scheduling and a reasonable number of hops.