Congestion-based pricing resource management in broadband wireless networks

Supporting the diverse QoS requirements of multimedia applications is an essential requirement for broadband wireless access (BWA) networks. Due to the projected dynamics in traffic patterns, more capable resource management functionalities are needed. We propose a game-theoretic, congestion-based pricing scheduler that incorporates two sub-schemes: a bandwidth provisioning sub-scheme to address the bandwidth scarcity to provision in fourth generation (4G) BWA technologies and an efficient packet scheduler sub-scheme. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheduler is the first one to simultaneously control congestion and fairness while providing differentiated QoS guarantees in BWA networks. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme realizes our objectives of controlling congestion, providing differentiated QoS guarantees, and catering to proportional fairness among the different network classes and among connections within the same class.