Bandwidth Allocation for 3-Sector Base Station in 802.16 Single-Hop Self-Backhaul Networks

Though IEEE 802.16 MAC protocols have been proposed to support quality of service (QoS) guarantees for various kinds of applications, they do not suggest how to allocate service bandwidth to fulfill QoS requirements. Most of the traditional methods of bandwidth allocation in wireless networks treat uplink and downlink bandwidth allocation independently. This research conducts theoretical analysis on the on-demand bandwidth allocation in an IEEE 802.16 single-hop self-backhaul network using 3-sector base station. Simulations have shown that such wireless backhaul systems using conventional on-demand bandwidth allocation will seriously suffer from fairness issues among different sectors of the base station. We then develop a new, joint dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm for IEEE 802.16 single-hop self-backhaul network using 3-sector base station. Simulation results verified that, compared with conventional on-demand bandwidth allocation method, by considering both uplink and downlink bandwidth requests jointly, the proposed method is more bandwidth efficient and exhibits better fairness.