2010 International Conference on Measuring Technology and Mechatronics Automation

A Novel and Effective QoS Guarantee Scheme in WiMAX System

Wu Lin, Zhang Luyong, Wang Rui
Beijing University of Posts and TelecommunicationsBeijing, 100876,China wulin1984@126.com

AbstractIEEE802.16 is a promising wireless broadband technology for the next generation last mile access. Though Quality of service (QoS) is guaranteed by the standard which defines five types of multimedia traffic classes, it doesnt define any specific admission control strategy and scheduling algorithm which are left to venders to design, and they have been becoming the research hotspot and many manufacturers, institutes and colleges begin to study QoS guarantee mechanism. A variety of admission control strategy and scheduling algorithm have been proposed and implemented at the MAC layer, but none of them is perfect. In this paper, we propose a novel admission control strategy based on resource reserved mechanism and design an effective and fair four-level scheduling architecture, which could provide predefined QoS for different service classes. Detailed simulation experiments are provided to validate fairness and effectiveness of proposed QoS guarantee strategy and results show it can achieve the desired effect. Keywords-WIMAX; IEEE802.16; QoS; MAC; Admission control; Scheduling algorithm.

as high data rate, QoS guarantee, spectrum scalability, security and mobility [2]. However, in spite of including QoS guarantee scheme, the standard does not define specific admission control strategy and scheduling algorithm to schedule different types of traffic, so they are becoming the research hotspot and many manufacturers, institutes and colleges begin to study them. And a variety of admission control strategy have been proposed and implemented at the MAC layer[5,8,12,13]with more or less defectsand many kinds of scheduling algorithm studied in [1-6] can not effectively supporting all WiMAX classes of servicewhich shows that a good access control scheme and an efficient, fair and robust scheduler for WiMAX system are still an open research area. In this paper, we propose a novel admission control strategy based on resource reserved mechanism and design an effective and fair four-level scheduling architecture, which could provide predefined QoS for different service classes. The rest of paper is organized as follows. Section II gives a simple introduction of WiMAX system. Section III presents the novel admission control (AC) based bandwidth resource reservation. Section IV proposes a four-level scheduling architecture and gives our simulation results to validate the performance of proposed AC and scheduling architecture. Finally, Section V concludes this paper.

1. INTRODUCTION During these years, with the huge growth of high-speed wireless data service and high quality multimedia applications, the traditional wireless access technology has gradually dissatisfied the demand of users. Under this situation, research institutions and organizations begin to study new wireless access technology, such as WLAN, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, CDMA2000, WIMAX (World interoperability for Microwave Access) and so on. In this paper, we only introduce WIMAX technology which is a promising broadband wireless access standard that can support high-speed Internet access and services for heterogeneous classes of traffic [1]. WiMAX is a broadband wireless solution, whose mobile edition is IEEE802.16e which can provide convergence of mobile and fixed broadband networks by a common wide area broadband radio access technology and flexible network architecture. Some of the features are notable, such
978-0-7695-3962-1/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICMTMA.2010.656 208

Fig.1. PMP network topology

II. WiMAX SYSTEM In this section, we give a simple description of the PHY layer and MAC layer of IEEE 802.16, as well as the QoS

architecture specified by the standard [9]. The IEEE 802.16 WirelessMAN system contains one central Base Station (BS) and one or more Subscriber Stations (SSs) in one architectural cell. The BS is responsible for communicating all SSs and regulating their behavior. There are two operation modes in the standard, such as point-to-multipoint (PMP) and mesh modes. In this paper, we only consider PMP mode. Fig.1 illustrates the PMP wireless network topology. A.PHY layer The physical layer operation is frame based and supports both Time Division Duplex (TDD) and Frequency Division Duplex (FDD) configurations. In this section we only consider the frame structure of TDD configurations. In TDD-based WirelessMAN system [7], a transmission frame is defined as a fixed time duration that consists of downlink and uplink which are designated for BS-to-SS and SS-to-BS transmissions respectively. As shown in Fig.2, the downlink subframe begins with frame preamble, Downlink MAP (DL_MAP) and Uplink MAP (UL_MAP). DL_MAP and UL_MAP are broadcasted to all SSs, which define the transmission burst profiles that include modulation and coding schemes and timing information for the following downlink and uplink transmissions respectively. Downlink data bursts are broadcasted by the BS to all SSs. The uplink subframe includes initial ranging and contention-based bandwidth request intervals under the discretion of the frame scheduler at the BS. The uplink data bursts are organized in Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) fashion and differentiated by the sending SSs. B.MAC layer WiMAX layer is connection-oriented. A connection is defined as a unidirectional mapping between SS and BS. A connection is identified by its unique Connection Identifier (CID) and is mapped to a service flow defined by service flow Identifier (SFID), so QoS parameters defined for the service flow is provided by the connections CID. In order to support applications with different service requirements, WiMAX defines five scheduling service types of MAC layer (such as UGS, ertPS, rtPS, nrtPS, BE). Each connection is categorized into one of these five service types, according to the property of applications carried by this connection [6].

Fig.2. Illustration of TDD frame structure

C.QoS architecture IEEE802.16 only defines the signaling mechanisms for QoS, admission control mechanism and packet scheduling algorithm are left for venders to design. Fig.3 shows the QoS architecture present in IEEE802.16 [9].

Fig.3. QoS architecture of IEEE 802.16

III. NOVEL ADMISSION CONTROL SCHEME In this section, we will propose our admission control mechanism based resource reservation scheme at MAC layer. In [8], it only reserves bandwidth for UGS, and the remaining bandwidth will be contented by other scheduling traffics: rtPS, nrtPS and BE. If UGS and rtPS traffics are in heavy load, there will be less or even no bandwidth left for low priority traffics (such as nrtPS and BE). In order to overcome above shortcoming, an admission control strategy based on the minimum reserved bandwidth is proposed in [5], provided reserved bandwidth for UGS, ertPS, rtPS and nrtPS, respectively. We know channel situation and arrival rate of traffic flow may change randomly, it will waste bandwidth resource if some of them is allocated to connections with bad wireless environment, so we should hand over the bandwidth of bad links to other thirsty links which have higher SINR. Admission control in [5] is based on the minimum reserved bandwidth, when the system reaches to the maximum number of connections that could be admitted, which will have large delay if arrival rate of all connections increases and stays a long time, so we should set amount bandwidth for burst traffic flow. We propose a novel admission control which overcomes shortcomings of [5] and [8], and reserved bandwidth in our proposed scheme is based QoS requirement of every connection instead of minimum reserved bandwidth. A. Basic thought The basic thought of our admission control strategy based on bandwidth reservation is described as follows:
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divide the whole bandwidth into six parts: one part of them is assigned to be a burst contention bandwidth which can not be reserved, another part is assigned to be a public reserved bandwidth, and remainder are distributed to other class of services except BE service. Fig.4 shows the allocation of whole bandwidth. When a new service ask for admission, its exclusive reserved bandwidth will be estimated whether to meet the demand. It will be admitted and obtain bandwidth directly if its exclusive reserved bandwidth can satisfy its demand. Otherwise, we will adopt following steps to decide the new connection request whether to be admitted or not. 1) degrade bandwidth of connections that have been admitted except UGS, 2) occupy the public reserved bandwidth which has not been occupied, 3) check channel quality of admitted connections, 4) degrade the bandwidth occupied by BE

network.

Di _ used The part of exclusive reserved bandwidth of the i

service class that has been used

f (QoS ) : Function of QoS requirement, f (QoS ) [0,1] .

C. Detailed admission control scheme 1) The UGS is designed to support real-time service flows that transport fixed-size data packets on a periodic basis. The BS provides fixed size data grants at periodic intervals to the service flow, therefore the maximum of transmission rate is equal to the minimum, so steps are as follows: a) if its remaining part of exclusive reserved bandwidth is more than

rUGS

is a

constant. When a new UGS service asks for admission, the

rUGS ,

that if rUGS

( Di Di _ used ) is true, it

can be admitted; b) else calculate remaining part of the public reserved bandwidth, whether it could meet the requirement, if

rUGS ( Dpublic Dpublic _ used ) is true, it can be admitted;

c) else check channel quality of connections which have been admitted, if their channel quality is bad (SNR is very low), hand over their reserved bandwidth to new
Fig.4. Bandwidth allocation

connections; d) else the admitted BE service will be reduced, we adopt degrading method similar to nrtPS in [8] and BE service could degrade to zero due to no QoS requirement for itself , if

B. Denotations used in this paper are listed as follows:

B : Total bandwidth Di : Exclusive reserved bandwidth for the i service class,

which is usually evaluated by long term bandwidth requirements and the current network load state

rUGS : Reserved bandwidth for a UGS service flow ri : Reserved bandwidth for a service flow of ertPS, rtPS or
nrtPS

rUGS Dbe _ reduce(h) is

h =1

true, it can be admitted. If all

bandwidth of BE service is handed over to public reserved part, the remaining public reserved bandwidth still not satisfy the connection request, the access request will be rejected. 2) For ertPS, rtPS and nrtPS service, owing to service flow are dynamic, their connection transmission rate are between the maximum and the minimum traffic rate, and

r min : Minimum reserved rate for a service flow of ertPS,

rtPS or nrtPS

r max : Maximum sustained rate for a service flow of ertPS,

rtPS or nrtPS

Di _ reduce : Bandwidth released by one i service class

Di _ reduce : Summation of the bandwidth released by H

h =1

ri = r min + (r max r min) f (QoS )

follows:

ri [r min, r max]

service

When a new service asks for admission, the steps are as a) estimate whether its remaining part of exclusive reserved bandwidth is more than

Dpublic Public reserved bandwidth Dbrust Bandwidth for burst service Dpublic _ used part of public reserved bandwidth that has The
been used, which is dynamic changed in

ri , if ri ( Di Di _ used )

is true,

210

it can be admitted; b) else the services flow which has been admitted should be degraded and estimate whether it could satisfy requirement of new service, we adopt degrading method similar to nrtPS in [8]
H

We use Earliest Deadline First (EDF) for rtPS, Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) for nrtPS. In [4], a two-level subcategory management method is proposed to provide an internal scheduling among different BE traffic for better user experience and we adopt it in our architecture. Fig.5 shows the scheduling architecture. is true, it can be admitted;

and

ensure

their

QoS

after

degrading,

if

ri Di _ reduce
h =1

c) else calculate remaining part of the public reserved bandwidth, whether it could meet the requirement, if ri ( Dpublic Dpublic _ used ) is true, it can be admitted; d) else check channel quality of connections which have been admitted, if their channel quality is bad(SNR is very low),hand over their bandwidth to new connections; e) else the admitted BE service will be reduced, we adopt degrading method similar to nrtPS in [8] and BE service could degrade to zero due to no QoS requirement for itself, if
Fig.5. Four-level scheduling architecture
H

ri
h =1

In this paper, WRR is used to allocate remaining

Dbe _ reduce(h) is true; it could be admitted. If all

bandwidth after reservation mechanism, which consists of burst contention bandwidth and remainder of public reserved bandwidth. In WRR, the weight for each connection is Wi , and

bandwidth of BE service is handed over to public reserved part, the remaining public reserved bandwidth still not satisfy the connection request, the access request will be rejected. 3) For BE service, it has no QoS requirement, so it can be admitted without any restriction. And all admitted BE connections share the remainder of bandwidth fairly. IV. SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS A. Scheduling architecture We know that packet scheduling algorithm in wireless network has been studied for a long time, but none of them is capable of effectively supporting all WiMAX classes of service [3]. Reference [1] proposes a bandwidth scheduling architecture based on serious priority queue which causes unfairness among all service classes. AWFS is introduced in [10], which is so complicated that it difficult to be carried out in device. Ref. [2] describes a cross-layer scheduling algorithm, which makes use of information of physic layer and application layer. In this section, we propose a fair, effective and robust scheduling architecture with four-level. Because bandwidth requirement for a UGS service is time-invariant, the grant for UGS is provisioned periodically by the BS with fixed value, so we adopt WRR scheduling algorithm to schedule ertPS ,rtPS, nrtPS and BE except UGS.
211

Wi = Ri Pi Li Qi Ri : ratio of remaining bandwidth request of connection i to

all connections,

Pi : priority factor of connection i, Li : queue length of connection i, Qi : channel quality (SINR) of connection i.
Remaining bandwidth that connection i obtains is Bi _ remain ,

N is the number of connections in system, Bi _ res and Bi

are reserved bandwidth and whole bandwidth connection i obtains respectively.

B i _ rem ain = ( D public D public _ used + D brust )W i / W i

i =1

Bi = Bi _ res + Bi _ remain
B. Simulation and results analysis We simulated a WiMAX PMP scenario with ten SS and one BS as shown in the Fig. 1. Each SS supports five in-coming (UGS, ertPS, rtPS, nrtPS, BE) and five outgoing (UGS, ertPS, rtPS, nrtPS, BE) flows. We used CBR traffic

to emulate UGS flows and Poisson traffic to emulate ertPS, rtPS, nrtPS and BE flows. The total bandwidth is 50 Mbps. The TDMA frame size is set as 10ms which could be adjusted automatically depending on up-link and down-link load, and simulation interval is 1000 frames. In a UGS traffic flow, an MPDU is of fixed size (300 bytes). A traffic flow for other service classes is a Poisson process and MPDU size is exponentially distributed with mean of 500, 1000, 1000 and 1000 bytes, respectively. And we assume that all packets arrive at the beginning of a frame and each SS has an infinite queue. Average data rate of one UGS, ertPS, is rtPS, nrtPS of and BE them, service that flow

the figure, we know our proposed combined scheme further makes low priority traffic flow obtain some amount bandwidth in heavy network load, while low priority traffic flow will be starved to death in PQ, that is to say, our proposed method provide fairness among all traffic classes (BE can not get fairness service in NRAC).Through fig.7, we find throughput of low priority traffic flow degrades faster than other high priority service flow, which indicates priority property is considered when emphasizing fairness.
400 350 300 Throughput(kbit/frame) 250 200 150 100 50 0 PQ-ertps PQ-rtPS PQ-nrtPS PQ-BE PRO-ertps PRO-rtPS PRO-nrtPS PRO-BE

R1 , R 2 , R 3 , R 4 and R 5 respectively, and R is a

is

summation

R = R1 + R 2 + R 3 + R 4 + R 5 .
30 28 26 Average delay(ms) 24 22 20 18 16 14
Throughput(500Kbps/frame)

DAC-UGS DAC-ertPS DAC-rtPS DAC-nrtPS DAC-BE NRAC-UGS NRAC-ertPS NRAC-rtPS NRAC-nrtPS NRAC-BE

1.05 1.1 1.15 Traffic Intensity(Erlang)

1.2

Fig.7. Throughput of all service classes when arrival rate of ertPS increases.
1 Dynamic allocation Fixed allocation 0.98

12 10 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 R(Mbps) 1.8 2

0.96

0.94

Fig.6. Average delay comparison between NRAC and admission control in [5]

0.92

0.9

Owing to burst contention bandwidth in proposed novel reservation admission control mechanism (NRAC) in III that can not be reserved, the maximum number of connections could be admitted in NRAC is less than admission control in [5]. We assume arrival rate of ertPS, rtPS and nrtPS increases and the number of connections admitted reaches to maximum in NRAC and [5] respectively, Fig.6 compares average delay between admission control in [5] and NRAC. Result shows NRAC has lower average delay, that is because burst contention bandwidth in NRAC is used to deal with service flow whose arrival rate increases, so average delay in NRAC is smaller; but all flow ,resulting in higher delay. NRAC maintains fairness in bandwidth reservation phase. And we still require fairness after reservation, so we combine four-level scheduling architecture combined with NRAC. WRR plays an important role in combined scheme. Fig.7 shows dynamic change of all service classes throughput when arrival rate of ertPS traffic increases. From bandwidth resource in [5] is reserved and no bandwidth to cope with burst

0.88 0.9 0.95 1 1.05 Traffic Intensity(Erlang) 1.1

Fig.8. Throughput comparison between adaptive and fixed frame allocation

In our proposed scheduling scheme we adopt adaptive frame allocation between UL subframe and DL subframe. Fig.8 describes the difference between dynamic and fixed frame allocation method. We can see that throughput of adaptive frame allocation is similar to fixed frame allocation in low network load, but more than fixed allocation method in high network load due to asymmetry between uplink and downlink service rate, causing waste by fixed frame allocation, which shows that Dynamic frame allocation could make the best of limited bandwidth resource. NRAC has provided a certain degree of fairness, now WRR further improves fairness. Fig.9 introduces average delay between PQ and our proposed combined scheme when arrival rate of nrtPS increases. The curve of BE is lower in proposed scheduling algorithm than in PQ, and curve of nrtPS is higher in proposed scheduling algorithm than in PQ. The reason is that WRR provides a weight to BE service

212

flow in our method to make it obtain some bandwidth in high network load, while it will not be served due to starving to death in PQ which serves high priority service flow first. Owing to WRR, nrtPS can not occupy bandwidth of BE without any restriction and must depend on its weight: Wi , so it obtains bandwidth less than in PQ and causes that its delay bigger than in PQ.
6000 PQ-UGS PQ-ertPS PQ-rtPS PQ-nrtPS PQ-BE PRO-UGS PRO-ertPS PRO-rtPS PRO-nrtPS PRO-BE

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Fig.10 is fairness comparison between PQ and proposed scheduling scheme. We adapt calculation method of fairness in [11].When arrival rate of nrtPS increases, the curve of PQ rises much faster than proposed scheduling architecture, which shows our proposed mechanism is fairer than PQ. This is because BE service flow can not get bandwidth in heavy network load in PQ, but it could obtain bandwidth in proposed mechanism which adapts WRR and NRAC.
1 0.9 0.8 0.7 F e In x airn ss de 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 0.95 PQ PRO

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V. CONCLUSION In this study we propose a novel admission control scheme which reserves bandwidth for UGS, ertPS, rtPS, and nrtPS service, respectively, and leaves a burst contention bandwidth for service flow whose arrival rate increases. And we combine it with our proposed four-level packet scheduling architecture, through our simulations and analysis, which shows proposed scheme not only guarantees QoS of all service classes, but also provides fairness among them.

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