A Novel QoS Scheduling Approach for IEEE 802.

16
BWA Systems
Shou-Chih Lo and Yuan-Yung Hong
Dept. of Computer Science and Information Engineering
National Dong Hwa University
Hualien, Taiwan,China
Email: sclo@mail.ndhu.edu.tw
Abstract In this paper, we propose a novel packet scheduling
approach for quality-of-service support in the IEEE 802.16
systems. The proposed approach is a really compromised solution
which has good performance on all evaluating aspects of data
throughput, packet drop rate, and fairness. We discuss different
scheduling strategies for 802.16 systems and propose a new
scheduling approach based on both the concepts of weighted fair
queuing and earliest deadline first. The simulation results show
the superiority of our proposed approach over other ones.
Keywords- IEEE 802.16, Packet Scheduling, Service
Differentiation, Quality-of-Service
I. INTRODUCTION
IEEE 802.16 [1] is a standard for wireless metropolitan area
networks (WMAN) and belongs to broadband wireless access
(BWA) technology. The main advantages of IEEE 802.16
systems are quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee data
transmissions, more users, much higher data rates and much
longer transmission distances.
The IEEE 802.16 system, which operates at the 10-66 GHz
or 2-11 GHz band, has two basic operational modes: point-to-
multipoint (PMP) and mesh. In PMP mode, the SSs (subscriber
stations) are only allowed to communicate through the BS
(base station) in two transmission directions: uplink (from SS
to BS) and downlink (from BS to SS). In mesh mode, SSs can
directly communicate to each other without the BS. We stress
on the PMP mode in this paper.
The 802.16 MAC (medium access control) protocol is
connection-oriented, so any application must establish
connections with the BS. The BS will assign every connection
for both directions with a unique connection ID (CID). All
connections can be specified having different QoS parameters
which are given implicitly by service class names or explicitly.
Four service classes are defined in the 802.16 standard:
Unsolicited Grant Service (UGS), real-time Polling Service
(rtPS), non-real-time Polling Service (nrtPS), and Best Effort
(BE).
For QoS management, the following mechanisms have
been defined in the standard: (1) the signaling mechanism for
information exchange between BS and SS such as the
connection set-up, BW-request, DL-MAP, and UL-MAP, and
(2) the scheduling for UGS service flows. However, the
following mechanisms are not addressed in the standard: (1)
the admission control, and (2) the scheduling for rtPS, nrtPS,
and BE service flows. We would discuss these undefined issues
in this paper and emphasize the scheduling mechanism.
There are many papers [2-10] that discuss the scheduling
problem in 802.16 systems. However, these proposed
approaches are not a compromised solution which has good
performance in all aspects. Some of them achieve low packet
drop rates but fall into unfair approaches. Some approaches
have good fairness but suffer from low throughput. Our major
contribution of the paper is that the proposed scheduling
approach is a really compromised one.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section
II introduces the related work. Section III presents our
proposed scheduling approach. The performance evaluation is
shown in Section IV. Finally, we draw conclusions in Section
V.
II. RELATED WORK
Whenever a connection is established between one SS and
the BS, the traffic characteristics of the connection would be
reported to the BS. Among these characteristics, we are
concerned about three parameters in all our discussions:
maximal sustained rate (B
i
max
), minimum reserved rate (B
i
min
),
and maximum latency (d
i
), which specify the peak data
transmission rate (in bps), the minimum guaranteed data
transmission rate (in bps), and the maximum delay time for any
connection i, respectively. The traffic classes defined in the
802.16 standard have the following traffic characteristics:
UGS: B
i
max
= B
i
min
.
rtPS: B
i
max
>> B
i
min
and d
i
is specified.
nrtPS: B
i
max
>> B
i
min
.
BE: B
i
min
= 0 and B
i
max
is not specified.
After a connection is established, one SS can issue
bandwidth requests (through BW-request packets) to the BS.
We assume that each SS would report the current queue size
(R
i
) in bits for each connection i that is currently established by
the SS in each BW-request packet. Then the BS can determine
how to schedule the data transmission for connection i both in
uplink and downlink directions according to the QoS
requirement and queue state.
==================
978-1-4244-2251-7/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE
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Suppose that the TDD-based (time division duplex) frame
structure is used, where each frame is composed of one uplink
subframe and one downlink subframe. The BS performs the
scheduling work by allocating the bandwidth of each frame to
all admitted connections. A whole scheduling scheme can be
divided into two stages: inter-class and intra-class scheduling.
A. Inter-class scheduling
The inter-class scheduling allocates the total required
bandwidth to each traffic class. All connections in the same
traffic class would share the allocated bandwidth to that class.
Three representative scheduling approaches are introduced
below.
1) Priority Queuing (PQ) [2][5]: The BS allocates
bandwidth to each traffic class in the order of UGS > rtPS >
nrtPS > BE such that each traffic class gets sufficient resource
to serve all connections within. This approach is simple but
suffers from the starvation problem with low-priority classes.
2) Deficit Fair Priority Queuing (DFPQ) [3]: DFPQ is an
enhanced scheme of DWRR (deficit weighted round robin) [6].
The main concept of DFPQ is to let every traffic class can get
fixed bandwidth and be not starved. The BS will compute an
initial quantum value of every traffic class by summing up
B
i
max
(or B
i
min
if B
i
max
is not available) for each connection i
within. At each run, the BS goes through the highest traffic
class to the lowest one, and would continuously serve data
packets of the same traffic class as long as the remaining
quantum value is not zero. This approach would become
infeasible for BE service flows with the specified bandwidth
equal to zero.
3) Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) [4][7]: The bandwidth
is distributed to each traffic class based on a weighted value
which is usually the fraction of total bandwidth requirements
for a traffic class and is computed according to B
i
min
or R
i
.
The scheduling algorithm would allocate fixed bandwidth to
UGS, and the remaining bandwidth to other traffic classes in a
weighted fashion.
B. Intra-class scheduling
Intra-class scheduling allocates bandwidth to each
connection in a traffic class from the total bandwidth allocated
to that traffic class. Four representative scheduling approaches
are introduced below.
1) First In First Out (FIFO): The BS serves data packets
of all connections within in the order of arrival time. This
approach is suitable for UGS.
2) Round Robin (RR) [8]: All connections within take
turns to be served for one packet transmission by the BS. This
approach is suitable for BE.
3) Weighted Fair Queue (WFQ) [9][10]: Each connection
receives a fraction of bandwidth in a weighted fashion based
on the value B
i
min
/ B
i
min
(or R
i
/ R
i
). This approach is
suitable for nrtPS.
4) Earliest Deadline First (EDF) [2]: The BS serves data
packets of all connections within in the order of transmission
deadline. This approach is suitable for rtPS.
III. THE PROPOSED APPROACH
First, we introduce the admission control mechanism used
in the paper. A connection if admitted has to satisfy Equation
(1), where C
total
is the total capacity (in bps) of the wireless
access channel:
min
For all admitted
connections
0
total i
C B t

(1)
Note that BE service flows would be always admitted due to
B
i
min
= 0.
Next, we illustrate our proposed scheduling approach from
two aspects: inter-class and intra-class scheduling. We involve
the design principle of weighted fairness and earliest deadline
first into our scheduling. Since the scheduling is performed
frame by frame, we would discuss how much bandwidth in
data bits is allocated to a particular connection within a frame.
A. Inter-class scheduling
Let FPS denote the frame rate per second of the 802.16
system. Then the following two terms N
i
min
and N
i
max
respectively represent the minimum and maximum number of
data bits that should be reserved in a frame for connection i.
For each traffic class, we first reserve N
i
min
data bits for
all connections within that traffic class. The N
i
min
and N
i
max
are
defined separately for each traffic class as below:
min max min
/ , UGS
i i i
N N B FPS i
min min
max max
/ , rtPS
/ , rtPS
i i
i i
N B FPS i
N B FPS i

min min
max max
min{ / , }, nrtPS
min{ / , }, nrtPS
i i i
i i i
N B FPS R i
N B FPS R i

min
max
0, BE
, BE
i
i i
N i
N R i

Note that R
i
is an indicator of the queue size of any
connection i at each fame scheduling time. The remaining
bandwidth of a frame after the above allocation is denoted by
F
free
. If F
free
is greater than zero, this bandwidth will be further
allocated to all connections from traffic classes rtPS, nrtPS, and
BE
1
. Suppose there are N connections in these traffic classes.
Each of these connections would get extra N
i
add
data bits
according to the following equation.
max min
min{ , / }, rtPS, nrtPS, or BE
add free
i i i
N N N F N i

1
Note that we always consider UGS service flows have
regular traffic patterns and hence N
i
min
is equal to R
i
. Therefore,
it is not necessary to allocate extra bandwidth to UGS service
flows.
?008 !!th Tlll Tutuut`ouu' Couu ou Commuu`ut`ou Thuo'o_) lod`u_:
+
B. Intra-class scheduling
After the inter-class scheduling, each connection gets the
bandwidth of N
i
min
+ N
i
add
. For UGS, nrtPS, and BE service
flows, the BS serves the right number of data packets from
each connection queue according to the allocated bandwidth in
the intra-class scheduling phase. For rtPS service flows, we
aggregate the allocated bandwidth to all the connections of that
traffic class and denote the aggregated bandwidth as F
rtPS
(=
(N
i
min
+ N
i
add
)). We would reallocate F
rtPS
to rtPS connections
by referring to their delay requirements.
Let f denote the time duration of one frame at the physical
layer. We assume that each d
i
t 2f and is the multiple of f. Let
d
max
be the maximal value of all d
i
s currently recorded in the
BS. Let a
i
[t - f , t] denote the set of data packets arrived at time
period [t - f , t] for connection i, and H
i
[t - f , t] denote the set of
data packets in a
i
[t - f , t] but not served by the BS yet. The
amount of data bits in set a
i
or H
i
is denoted by |a
i
| or |H
i
|.
The main concept of our scheduling scheme is to serve first
the data packets with their deadlines being expired at the next
upcoming frame, and serve next the other data packets in a
weighted fashion. We use the data structure in Table I to list all
rtPS connections in descendent order of d
i
.
TABLE I. THE CONDITION OF RTPS CONNECTIONS
[t - (d
max
- f),
t - (d
max
- 2f)]
. . . [t - 3f, t -2f] [t - 2f, t - f] [t - f, t]
C
x
(d
x
=
d
max
)
H
x
[t - (d
max
-
f), t - (d
max
-
2f)]
. . .
H
x
[t - 3f, t -
2f]
H
x
[t - 2f, t
- f]
H
x
[t - f,
t]
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
C
y
(d
y
=
4f)
0 . . .
H
y
[t - 3f, t -
2f]
H
y
[t - 2f, t
- f]
H
y
[t - f,
t]
C
z
(d
z
=
3f)
0 . . . 0
H
z
[t - 2f, t
- f]
H
z
[t - f,
t]
C
k
(d
k
=
2f)
0 . . . 0 0
H
k
[t - f,
t]
The following three steps illustrate our proposed intra-class
scheduling for rtPS:
Step 1: At the beginning of every frame, we set H
i
[t - f , t] = a
i
[t
- f , t], and the data packets in H
i
[t - d
i
, t - (d
i
- f)] will be
dropped. The data packets in H
i
[t - (d
i
- f) , t - (d
i
- 2f)] are the
most urgent ones at time t and should be served immediately.
Step 2: Compute the value H
i
[t - (d
i
- f) , t - (d
i
- 2f)]| - F
rtPS
and check which of the following cases is satisfied
2
.
x Case 1 (> 0): F
rtPS
is not enough, so every connection i
will share the bandwidth according to the weighted
value |H
i
[t - (d
i
- f) , t - (d
i
- 2f)]|/H
i
[t - (d
i
- f) , t - (d
i
-
2f)]|. End the scheduling work of the current frame.
x Case 2 (d 0): F
rtPS
is enough, so every connection i will
get the exact bandwidth of |H
i
[t - (d
i
- f) , t - (d
i
- 2f)]|.
The remaining available bandwidth is updated as F
rtPS

2
H
i
[t - (d
i
- f) , t - (d
i
- 2f)]| is a summation value along the
diagonal line of Table I.
= F
rtPS
H
i
[t - (d
i
- f) , t - (d
i
- 2f)]|, and each R
i
is
updated as R
i
= R
i
- |H
i
[t - (d
i
- f) , t - (d
i
- 2f)]|. IfR
i
z
0 and F
rtPS
z 0, go to Step 3; Otherwise, end the
scheduling work of the current frame.
Step 3: Compute the value R
i
- F
rtPS
and check which of the
following cases is satisfied.
x Case 1 (> 0): Each connection i will further share the
remaining bandwidth according to the weighted value
R
i
/R
i
.
x Case 2 (d 0): Each connection i can be fully served by
the BS with the amount of data bits equal to R
i
.
Those data packets that have been served by the BS are
removed from the set H
i
in the above steps.
IV. SIMULATION
We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheduling
approach via simulation programs and do performance
comparisons with other two approaches proposed in [2] and [4].
These two approaches are called DALF and SWRR in the
paper. DALF concentrates on the rtPS service flows and
always serves rtPS packets at their corresponding last frames
when the deadline is being expired. SWRR purely uses WFQ
as the core on packet scheduling. We observe the performance
in terms of data throughput (Simulation 1), dropped packets
(Simulation 2), and fairness (Simulation 3).
A. Simulation Environment
We consider a simulation environment with the PMP mode
and TDD frame structure, and assume that all SSs adopt the
same modulation in the physical layer. The simulation time is
500 ms, and each frame time is 10 ms. We vary the frame size
in bytes from 50000 to 60000, which corresponds to the
channel rate of 40 Mbps to 48 Mbps. In the simulation, we only
take care of the uplink schedule. Basically, there is no
difference between uplink schedule and downlink schedule.
Nine connections are established with their traffic
characteristics listed in Table II. The UGS, rtPS, nrtPS, and BE
service flows follow the CBR (constant bit rate), VBR
(variable bit rate), ftp, and web browsing traffic patterns,
respectively.
TABLE II. THE ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONS
CID
Traffic
class
Packet
size
(bytes)
Max.
Delay
(ms)
Max.
sustained
rate
(Kbytes/s)
Min.
reserved
rate
(Kbytes/s)
1 UGS 500 800 800
2 rtPS 400 30 1400 800
3 rtPS 400 50 2400 1200
4 rtPS 400 30 1200 600
5 rtPS 400 40 1400 600
6 nrtPS 640 1000 400
7 nrtPS 640 1400 600
8 BE 200
9 BE 200
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B. Simulation 1
This simulation compares the system throughput of three
approaches, and the result is shown in Fig. 1. Compared with
DALF and SWRR, our proposed approach has the highest
throughput for having the best usage on channel bandwidth.
DALF performs worst in average, since only rtPS service flows
are emphasized and other service flows are treated unfairly. All
approaches get improvement on the throughput as the frame
size is increased.
2000
2100
2200
2300
2400
2500
2600
2700
2800
2900
3000
50000 52000 54000 56000 58000 60000
Frame Size (bytes)
T
h
ro
u
g
h
p
u
t (K
b
y
te
s
)
DALF
Proposed
SWRR
Figure 1. Throuhgput comparison.
C. Simulation 2
In this simulation, we compare the total amount of rtPS
data packets that are dropped due to expired deadline. We can
see in Fig. 2 that DALF has the least amount of dropped
packets, because DALF uses the PQ scheduling and the rtPS
traffic class has high priority. SWRR which fairly deals with
service flows of all traffic classes experiences a high packet
drop rate. Our proposed approach which concentrates on the
most urgent data packets experiences a moderate packet drop
rate. All approaches would suffer from low packet drop rates as
the frame size is increased due to sufficient bandwidth.
D. Simulation 3
In this simulation, we compare the fairness on serving
service flows of different traffic classes. We show the
throughputs of rtPS, nrtPS, and BE traffic classes, separately in
Fig. 3 under a fixed frame size of 52000 bytes. DALF presents
unfair treatment on traffic classes, since the throughput gap
between rtPS and nrtPS is large. SWRR and our proposed
approach preserve the fairness feature by using WFQ.
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
700
800
900
1000
50000 52000 54000 56000 58000 60000
Frame Size (bytes)
D
ro
p
p
e
d
P
a
c
k
e
ts
(K
b
y
te
s
)
DALF
Proposed
SWRR
Figure 2. Drop rate comparison.
(Frame size is 52000 bytes)
1872.25
1569.2
1610.9
460.16 460.16
21.6 21.6
136.96
2.8
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
1800
2000
DALF SWRR Proposed
T
h
r
o
u
g
h
p
u
t
(
K
b
y
t
e
s
)
rtPS
nrtPS
BE
Figure 3. Fairness comparison.
From the above three simulations, we can find that our
proposed approach has good performance on all evaluating
aspects. This justifies our approach being a really compromised
scheduling solution in the 802.16 system.
V. CONCLUSIONS
The packet scheduling with QoS support in the IEEE
802.16 MAC protocol is an important but undefined issue. In
this paper, a new traffic scheduling approach is proposed. This
approach not only considers the fairness of all traffic classes,
but also stresses on the real-time traffic class having delay
requirements. We have justified that this approach is a really
compromised scheduling solution via simulations. A more
complex admission control mechanism will be considered in
the future.
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+9