Reducing Signaling Overhead and Latency of 802.16j Service Flow Management

Being an evolution of IEEE 802.16e, IEEE 802.16J mobile multi-hop relay (MMR) is proposed to gain coverage extension and throughput enhancement. The new network architecture imposes a demanding performance requirement on relay stations (RS), and these RSs involve great signaling overhead and latency compares with non-RS network. This article proposes a new method that manages service flows in 802.16J relay-based cell, to reduce service flow management signaling overhead and latency with little modification to the 802.16J draft standard. In the proposed scheme, we extended the "SF tunnel" which defined in the draft with an extra resource reservation (ERR). With these ERRs, every RS can admit its subordinate flow\´s QoS parameters depend on the available resource in tunnel without signal notification to multi-relay base station (MR-BS). The size of each ERRs can periodically update to satisfy the demand of the flows in each node. In our proposed method, some resources may be wasted due to ERR in tunnel, but the reduction of signaling overhead and latency would be more significant, especially in multi-hop RS-based network. Little modification to the draft also is the advantage of our scheme.