Performance evaluation of utility-based scheduling schemes with QoS guarantees in IEEE 802.16/WiMAX systems

One of the most important benefits that WiMAX technology brings, the ability to provide differentiated quality of service (QoS) guarantees, could also prove to be the largest problem for system designers, because scheduling mechanisms able to cope with these demands have not been explicitly defined in the standard. In order to facilitate the understanding of how various scheduling schemes perform in a real system, we present here a detailed performance evaluation of some utility-based scheduling algorithms, covering aspects like fairness and QoS provisioning. Through a series of extensive simulations, we analyse the ability of the scheduling schemes considered to strike a balance between fairness among users, or more restrictively, user QoS requirement satisfaction, and system efficiency maximization. Further, we show how several simple algorithms could be used as building blocks, constructing a powerful mechanism that allows the system designer to obtain any desired system behaviour, or even to dynamically change from one profile to another, depending on specific network-related conditions. More specifically, by combining the benefits of proportional fair (PF) scheduling with the highly desirable system capacity maximization, and also taking into account a peak-to-average (PTA) channel quality metric, we are able to define a rule that outperforms traditional scheduling schemes, copes with various network conditions and provides graceful service degradation. Our results indicate that, by exploiting the intrinsic properties of orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) as well as the mechanisms of the WiMAX system that are not regulated by the standard, one could increase the system efficiency, while fully respecting the QoS guarantees imposed. The use of algorithms that provide graceful performance degradation is highly advisable, in order to be able to employ a non-conservative call admission control (CAC) mechanism, which further improves the overall spectral efficiency by maintaining the system close to saturation at all times. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.