A Decentralized Minislot Scheduling Protocol (DMSP) for uplink and downlink traffic in IEEE 802.16 wireless mesh networks

This paper aims to investigate the minislot scheduling problem in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks, where a minislot is the atomic unit for bandwidth allocation. Inappropriate minislot selection will cause minislot insufficient problems and the data collision problems. These problems will degrade the network throughput and the minislot utilization. Therefore, a Decentralized Minislot Scheduling Protocol (DMSP) is proposed for throughput gains in IEEE 802.16 mesh networks. DMSP contains Minislot Usage Constraints (MUCs) and Minislot Decision Strategies (MDSs) for Subscriber Stations (SSs) to determine the validity of each minislot and to select minislots from valid minislots for the data transmission, respectively. Simulation results show that DMSP can achieve better performance than related work in terms of the transmission delay, control overhead, minislot utilization, and the network throughput.