ABSTRACT
Th e broadband wireless world is moving toward the adoption of WiMAX (the commercial name of the IEEE 802.16 standard) as the standard for broadband wireless Internet access. Th is will open up a very large market for industry and operators, with a major impact on the way Internet access is conceived today. On the other hand, the emergence of innovative multimedia broadband services is going to impose severe quality of service (QoS) constraints on underlying network technologies. In this work, after a brief review of the IEEE 802.16 standard, we intend to present an in-depth discussion of its QoS support features. We point out the scheduling algorithm as the critical point in QoS provisioning over such networks, and discuss architectural and algorithmic solutions for an effi cient support of multimedia fl ows. Performance measurements obtained from an experimental test-bed are also presented. Th e chapter concludes with a description of the key research challenges in the area, and provides a roadmap for the research in the fi eld.
