Service differentiation in OFDM-Based IEEE 802.16 networks

IEEE 802.16 network is widely viewed as a strong candidate solution for broadband wireless access systems. Various flexible mechanisms related to QoS provisioning have been specified for uplink traffic at the medium access control (MAC) layer in the standards. Among the mechanisms, bandwidth request scheme can be used to indicate and request bandwidth demands to the base station for different services. Due to the diverse QoS requirements of the applications, service differentiation (SD) is desirable for the bandwidth request scheme. In this paper, we propose several SD approaches. The approaches are based on the contention-based bandwidth request scheme and achieved by the means of assigning different channel access parameters and/or bandwidth allocation priorities to different services. Additionally, we propose effective analytical model to study the impacts of the SD approaches, which can be used for the configuration and optimization of the SD services. It is observed from simulations that the analytical model has high accuracy. Service can be efficiently differentiated with initial backoff window in terms of throughput and channel access delay. Moreover, the service differentiation can be improved if combined with the bandwidth allocation priority approach without adverse impacts on the overall system throughput.