An enhanced cross layer downlink scheduling algorithm for IEEE 802.16 networks

The ability to support quality of service (QoS) for a wide range of applications that exhibit different service requirements is a major competency of IEEE 802.16 networks. One of the keys to QoS provision is a scheduling algorithm that is able to determine the service ordering for packets from different service classes. This however is undefined in the standard to promote innovation by equipment vendors. In this paper, we propose an enhanced priority based cross layer scheduling algorithm. The algorithm improves the fairness towards lower priority connections as well as provides guarantees to real-time and non-real-time connections over an existing cross layer algorithm. Besides, our algorithm eliminates the need of configurable parameters, which is a major concern in the original algorithm. Through extensive simulations, we show that our algorithm performs better in several fronts as compared to six opportunistic and non-opportunistic scheduling algorithms.