Research on buffer management mechanisms of IEEE 802.16m saving scheme

The IEEE 802.16m network is the most popular network in Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WMANs). A user can send data from mobile devices to the Internet via IEEE 802.16m networks. An IEEE 802.16m network officially supports a power saving mechanism to make mobile devices work longer. In IEEE 802.16m networks, a base station caches data destined to a mobile device when the mobile device enters the sleep mode. When the mobile device wakes up, the base station sends the cached data to the mobile device in order to avoid data loss. Without a good buffer management mechanism, a base station may have buffer overflow to lose data if a mobile device sleeps a long time. In this paper, we propose a mechanism named Dynamic Buffer Management (DBM) to efficiently manage buffers of a base station in order to avoid the occurrence of buffer overflow. In simulations, DBM can reduce the occurrences of buffer overflow and data delay in IEEE 802.16m networks to efficiently utilize resources in networks.