Proposal and Evaluation of Load-Dependent Distributed Scheduling Algorithm for WiMAX in Mesh Mode

The IEEE 802.16 standard defines a broadband access network technology called WiMAX, that besides the point-to-multipoint mode it also defines a mesh mode. In this paper we propose a modification of scheduling defined in the standard for the mesh mode to incorporate dependence on the node´s load. The performance of the load-dependent distributed scheduling is compared with the distributed scheduling and the centralized scheduling of the standard, using NS-2 simulator with a modified WiMAX module. According to the simulations results, the load-dependent distributed scheduling algorithm outperformed the standard distributed algorithm in terms of the evaluated metrics.