Bandwidth Recycling using Variable Bit Rate

Abstract

IEEE 802.16 standard was designed to support the bandwidth demanding applications with quality of service (QoS). Bandwidth is reserved for each application to ensure the QoS. For variable bit rate (VBR) applications, however, it is difficult for the subscriber station (SS) to predict the amount of incoming data. To ensure the QoS guaranteed services, the SS may reserve more bandwidth than its demand. As a result, the reserved bandwidth may not be fully utilized all the time. In this paper, we propose a scheme, named Bandwidth Recycling, to recycle the unused bandwidth without changing the existing bandwidth reservation. The idea of the proposed scheme is to allow other SSs to utilize the unused bandwidth when it is available. Thus, the system throughput can be improved while maintaining the same QoS guaranteed services. Mathematical analysis and simulation are used to evaluate the proposed scheme. Simulation and analysis results confirm that the proposed scheme can recycle 35% of unused bandwidth on average. By analyzing factors affecting the recycling performance, three scheduling algorithms are proposed to improve the overall throughput. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm improves the overall throughput by 40% in a steady network.

Keywords: WiMAX, IEEE 802.16, Bandwidth Recycling