Bandwidth Allocation in WiMAX Networks using Scheduling Algorithm

An important problem for the WiMAX networks is how to provide a guaranteed quality of service for applications. A key aspect of this problem is how base stations should share bandwidth capacity between different classes of traffic. The decision needs to be made for each incoming packet and is known as the packet scheduling problem. A major challenge in packet scheduling is that the behavior of each traffic class may not be known in advance and can vary dynamically. This paper has described how the packet scheduling problem has been modeled as an application for reinforcement learning. We have demonstrated how our reinforcement learning approach could learn scheduling policies that satisfy the quality of service requirements of multiple traffic classes under a variety of conditions. The proposed solution has been designed to have an ability to accommodate integrated traffic in the networks with effective scheduling schemes. A series of simulation experiments have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheduling algorithm. Results revealed that the proposed solution performs effectively to the integrated traffic composed of messages with or without time constraints and achieves proportional fairness among different types of traffic.