Energy-saving centric uplink scheduling scheme for broadband wireless access networks

This study proposes an energy-saving centric uplink scheduling (ESC-US) scheme to support efficient energy usage and satisfy the quality of service (QoS) requirements of Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax) networks. The uplink resource allocation is different from that of the downlink resource allocation scheme because the uplink traffic is queued at the mobile station (MS) and the base station (BS) has no information regarding it without using a polling procedure. The considered resource scheduling schemes maximize the sleep efficiency and consider the QoS requirements of individual MSs. The proposed scheduling scheme in this study considers the delay budget of MSs with real-time connections and the required minimum reserved traffic rate (MRTR) of MSs with non-real time connections when maximizing sleep efficiency. Both scheduling schemes for the traffic of real-time polling services (rtPS) and non-real-time polling services (nrtPS) apply the 'just enough QoS' and 'sleep before transmission' (SbT) concepts to achieve this energy-saving centric objective. Exhaustive simulations were conducted to examine the performance of the proposed schemes. The simulation results show that both schemes guarantee the desired QoS and achieve superior energy-savings efficiencies compared to the conventional scheme.