Uplink Scheduling for Supporting Real Time Voice Traffic in IEEE 802.16 Backhaul Networks

In this paper we propose simple enhancements to the bandwidth (BW) request messages in IEEE 802.16 for supporting real-time packet voice traffic. Three different BW request formats are proposed, each requiring a different amount of latency information about the buffered packets at the SS. On this basis, packet scheduling schemes are proposed for the BS to make resource allocations for real-time traffic. Our results show that the proposed BW request and scheduling schemes achieve significantly lower packet loss probability than the standard IEEE 802.16 BW request with round robin scheduling. The results further show that there is an optimum point about how much delay information the SS should report to the BS in order to best utilize the uplink resources while the SS provides satisfactory real-time performance for the voice traffic.