A Scheduling Algorithm for Overhead Reduction in IEEE 802.16

Demand of high quality broadband wireless systems is quickly and continuously increasing day by day. Nowadays, one of the most promising Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) technologies is Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), characterized by the IEEE 802.16 standard. Efficient data transmission and available bandwidth use optimization are main factors which indicate quality of any communication network. In turn, one of the conditions that determines good channel utilization is the amount of overhead introduced because of the headers of transmitted packets. WiMAX technology is not exempt from this problem, mainly because of its centralized architecture. In this paper, we present an algorithm based on the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduler, which allows to reduce above mentioned overhead, maintaining required Quality of Service (QoS) parameters.