Listening interval spreading approach (LISA) for handling burst traffic in IEEE 802.16e wireless metropolitan area networks

The mobile wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) architecture imposes a demanding power management requirement on mobile stations (MSs) in order to prolong the lifetime of MS. The base station (BS) will functionally serve as a buffer for non-real-time traffic distribution to the multiple MSs associated with it, and thus naturally provide MSs with the power saving capability. However, the power management scheme in IEEE 802.16e standard, which was designed for handling sleep pattern of non-real-time traffic, often use timeout approach to trigger sleep mode, as a certain idle time prior entering sleep mode will render a potential latency and limit the overall power saving capacity. Moreover, the fast growing sleeping window would cause long packet reception delay. As a solution, we propose a new scheme, namely listening interval spreading approach (LISA), which redistributes the idle periods and a number of interim listening periods in order to reduce the response time of interactive traffic, such as HTTP applications. As confirmed by the performance evaluation, the proposed LISA can achieve significant response time reduction as well as better power saving efficiency than standard.