Design a novel fairness model in WiMAX mesh networks

WiMAX mesh is acting as a promising alternative to construct high speed and wide range multi-hop wireless access network; however the resource scheduling with respect to user fairness and system efficiency in such networks is still remained unspecified. To perform the global fair bandwidth allocation for all competing traffic flows, we design a new fairness model called multihop max-min fair (MMF) to be applied in WiMAX mesh network. The MMF fairness is firstly designed based on the homogenous scenario where every link holds the same transmission capacity; then it is extended to the heterogeneous scenario where different links have different transmission capacity. As for the scheduling for all those competing traffic flows over the mesh network, we first get the global fair share of scheduling opportunities for each flow according to the MMF principle, then determine the resource allocation for each flow and each traffic link. The relevant resource scheduling algorithm is given with an analysis on various performance metrics as well. The simulation results validate the superiority of our proposed scheme compared with the existing schemes. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.