A Fuzzy Logic-based Resource Management Scheme for High-quality Broadband Wireless Access Systems

This paper deals with the Radio Resource Management (RRM) layer of future Broadband Wireless Access System (BWAS). The interest here is in designing an efficient scheme able to integrate highly demanding traffics, such as high-quality real-time streaming video and interactive Web traffics. Many medium access protocols have been proposed in the literature for BWAS systems, but the fair sharing of resources and the achievement of a high throughput combined with good Quality of Service (QoS) levels are still open issues. We consider the traffic managed by an access point that coordinates video and interactive traffic terminals. These traffic sources notify the access point their transmission needs by means of a random access channel or a piggybacking scheme. In this paper we refer to a time division multiple access air interface and we propose an original solution where a medium access protocol and a usage parameter control technique are jointly adopted at the RRM layer. In particular, we adopt a cyclic assignment scheme with a novel traffic policer based on fuzzy logic for video sources and on a token-bucket approach for Web sources. Our scheme has been named Fuzzy Logic-Based Multiple Access (FLBMA) to remark the central function of the fuzzy policer. FLBMA performance has been derived through simulations. FLBMA achieves the following interesting results: (i) very high capacity of video traffic sources in comparison with alternative RRM schemes; (ii) fair service for video traffics; (iii) video traffic QoS independent of Web traffic load. This work represents the output of a research activity carried out under the financial support of MIUR and CNIT. Keywords— Computer Communications, Intelligent Systems, Newly Emerging Technologies, Mobile Personal Communications, Fuzzy Logic.