A bandwidth request reiteration mechanism for IEEE 802.16 wireless networks

The IEEE 802.16 is a leading technology for Broadband Wireless Access (BWA), where a Base Station (BS) provides a set of Subscriber Stations (SSs) with first-mile network access. Each SS has multiple connections directed to the BS, which are assigned bandwidth on a demand basis. Specifically, the BS allocates part of the channel as request slots, which are accessed by best-effort connections in a random access manner to transmit bandwidth requests. Although bandwidth requests sent by different SSs may collide the standard does not specify an explicit acknowledgment mechanism. This, and the bandwidth being assigned by the BS to each SS as a whole, may lead to critical inconsistencies between the perception of the SSs’ requirements at the BS and the actual SSs’ requirements, which in turn may entail SS service disruption. While the standard suggests that an SS should regularly update the BS about the backlog of its connections, the algorithm to do so is left unspecified. In this paper we propose a simple, yet effective, mechanism to be employed by the SSs, called Bandwidth Request Reiteration (BR²), which prevents deadlock from occurring. Using detailed packet-level simulation, we compare BR² to an alternative approach based on timeout, and show that BR² achieves better performance, in terms of the average transfer delay, while it does not incur a significant additional overhead, in terms of MAC signaling.