On the Integration of Scheduling and Allocation in OFDMA-Based WiMAX Networks

Mobile devices and real-time applications are increasingly demanding metropolitan network access with guaran teed quality of service. Current research points to the need of two main stages to provide quality of service in OFDMAbased WiMAX networks. These stages, called scheduling and allocation are deeply investigated on the literature. Howe ver, details on the integration of these mechanisms are not provi ded. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the integration of sche duling and allocation through a threshold criteria that considers the diversity of the traffic, limiting the amount of data and mapping overhead sent to allocation. The results show that our propo sal is fundamental to integrate scheduling and allocation and i s able to improve quality of service parameters, such as data alloc ation and delay. Keywords— Scheduling, allocation, quality of service, WiMAX