Radio-Aware Scheduler for WiMAX Systems Based on Time-Utility Function and Game Theory

The paper presents a scheduling algorithm for WiMAX systems, which exploits Time-Utility Functions (TUFs) and game theory. The scheduling decision is performed by means of two steps: the intra-class scheduling step and the inter-class scheduling step. In the first one, each user exploits TUFs to choice the packets to transmit according to QoS requirements. In the second one, the scheduler exploits the game theory to select a specific game solution that provides more or less fairness among the users that have to be served. The available physical network resources (i.e. slots) are taken into account as a constraint to the scheduling decision. The proposed scheduling algorithm follows a cross-layer approach that takes into account application requirements by means of TUFs and physical Channel State Information (CSI) of each user. Several game solutions are compared by means of simulation results in terms of user fairness, user throughput, packet delay and packet expiration rate. The TUFs introduction is also evaluated comparing the different applications performance.