A Novel Solution for Effective Bandwidth Utilization in 802.16 Networks

Bandwidth is reserved for each application to ensure the QoS. In this paper, we propose a scheme, named Effective Bandwidth Utilization, to recycle the unused and free bandwidth without changing the existing bandwidth reservation. The idea of the proposed scheme is to allow other SSs to utilize the unused bandwidth when it is free. IEEE 802.16 standard was designed to support the bandwidth demanding applications with quality of service (QoS). Effective utilization of scarce resources is important to managers in the telecommunications industry, and thus usage-based pricing has become an important tool to address. In this paper we develop a mechanism based on the effective bandwidth concept. This model, effectively characterizes the utilization and business of user in a single metric. For variable bit rate applications, it is difficult for the subscriber station (SS) to predict the amount of incoming data. To ensure the QoS guaranteed services, the SS may reserve more bandwidth than its demand. As a result, the reserved bandwidth may not be fully utilized all the time. We propose a scheme that effectively utilizes the unused bandwidth. The system throughput can be improved while maintaining the same QoS guaranteed services. Mathematical analysis and simulation are used to evaluate the proposed scheme. Simulation and analysis results confirm that the proposed scheme can recycle 43% of unused bandwidth on average. We conduct computational experiments to show the viability of this approach, and also discuss real-world implementation issues.