A QoS architecture for the MAC protocol of IEEE 802.16 BWA system

Providing quality of service (QoS) guarantees for heterogeneous classes of traffic with different QoS requirements in fixed broadband wireless access (BWA) system is a very important and challenging problem. Although IEEE 802.16 MAC protocols have been proposed to support QoS guarantees for various kinds of applications, they do not suggest how to schedule traffic to fulfill QoS requirements. In order to provide different levels of QoS guarantees for various applications while still achieving high system utilization, a QoS architecture should be integrated into the MAC protocol. We first provide a background on the IEEE 802.16 BWA system, we then propose an efficient QoS architecture, based on priority scheduling and dynamic bandwidth allocation, to provide QoS guarantees for the BWA system and propose an efficient scheduling strategy for schedulers in the architecture.