Published in IET Communications Received on 19th April 2010 Revised on 25th July 2010 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2010.0304 ISSN 1751-8628 Quality of service provisioning in worldwide interoperability for microwave access networks based on cooperative game theory Y. Jiao 1,2 M. Ma 3 Q. Yu 1 K. Yi 1 Y. Ma 1 1 State Key Laboratory of Integrated Services Networks, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, People’s Republic of China 2 Teaching and Research Section of Communications Equipment, Xian Communication Institute, Xi’an 710106, People’s Republic of China 3 School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore E-mail: emdma@ntu.edu.sg Abstract: Quality of service (QoS) is a critical issue in the design and management of worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WIMAX) networks. In this study, the authors propose a novel two-tier QoS framework and a scheduling scheme for QoS provisioning in WiMAX networks based on the Nash bargaining solution (NBS) obtained from cooperative game theory. The framework cannot only offer Pareto optimality for the entire system, but also assure fairness for each service and connection. They apply the NBS into the issue of QoS service in WiMAX networks. They utilise the equivalent optimisation problem to obtain the bargaining point. The parameters of the optimisation model have been verified by analysing the characteristics of each service flow in the WiMAX networks. A heuristic scheduling algorithm has been designed to implement the optimised solution. The effectiveness of the proposal has been verified by experimental results, which can show much better performance in terms of delay, loss rate and throughput. 1 Introduction The worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) technology has been emerging as one of the major broadband wireless access technologies quickly in recent years. The WiMAX networks are able to provide high-speed and high-quality broadband wireless access and have received a lot of attention from academia and industry. One of the important purposes of the WiMAX networks is to support different types of traffic such as real-time video or voice traffic over the wireless medium. In the design of WiMAX networks, a key issue is to satisfy the requirements of quality of service (QoS) for different types of traffic. The IEEE 802.16d standard [1] has specified a QoS support framework including service types, bandwidth requests and allocation mechanism. However, the details to support QoS service and scheduling algorithms for bandwidth allocation are left undefined. Many proposals have been made in the literatures to support QoS service in WiMAX networks. They can be classified into two categories. The early proposals mainly focus on utilising the well-known scheduling algorithms for the QoS service. An overview of well-known scheduling techniques for wireless networks can be found in [2]. In [3], an integrated scheduling algorithm and an admission control policy have been presented, by which the bandwidth is allocated among different service classes according to the fixed priority of each traffic class strictly. In [4], a worst-case fair weighted fair queuing+ algorithm based scheduling scheme has been proposed for the purpose of preserving QoS differentiation and fairness in downlink (DL) traffic delivery. The similar approaches for the traffic scheduling and bandwidth allocation can also be found in [5, 6]. However, the shortcoming of the conventional solutions is that the QoS requirements of the higher priority traffic can be satisfied whereas the lower priority traffic may suffer from starvation of the bandwidth. 284 IET Commun., 2011, Vol. 5, Iss. 3, pp. 284–295 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2011 doi: 10.1049/iet-com.2010.0304 www.ietdl.org