FEBA: A Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm for Service Differentiation in IEEE 802.16 Mesh Networks

In wireless mesh networks, the end-to-end throughput of traffic flows depends on the path length, i.e., the higher the number of hops, the lower becomes the throughput. In this paper, a fair end-to-end bandwidth allocation (FEBA) algorithm is introduced to solve this problem. FEBA is implemented at the medium access control (MAC) layer of single-radio, multiple channels IEEE 802.16 mesh nodes, operated in a distributed coordinated scheduling mode. FEBA negotiates bandwidth among neighbors to assign a fair share proportional to a specified weight to each end-to-end traffic flow. This way traffic flows are served in a differentiated manner, with higher priority traffic flows being allocated more bandwidth on the average than the lower priority traffic flows. In fact, a node requests/grants bandwidth from/to its neighbors in a round-robin fashion where the amount of service depends on both the load on its different links and the priority of currently active traffic flows. If multiple channels are available, they are all shared evenly in order to increase the network capacity due to frequency reuse. The performance of FEBA is evaluated by extensive simulations. It is shown that wireless resources are shared fairly among best-effort traffic flows, while multimedia streams are provided with a differentiated service that enables quality of service.