Performance Analysis of Contention Based Bandwidth Request Mechanisms in WiMAX Networks

WiMAX networks have received wide attention as they support high data rate access and amazing ubiquitous connectivity with great quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities. In order to support QoS, bandwidth request (BW-REQ) mechanisms are suggested in the WiMAX standard for resource reservation, in which subscriber stations send BW-REQs to a base station which can grant or reject the requests according to the available radio resources. In this paper we propose a new analytical model for the performance analysis of various contention based bandwidth request mechanisms, including grouping and no-grouping schemes, as suggested in the WiMAX standard. Our analytical model covers both unsaturated and saturated traffic load conditions in both error-free and error-prone wireless channels. The accuracy of this model is verified by various simulation results. Our results show that the grouping mechanism outperforms the no-grouping mechanism when the system load is high, but it is not preferable when the system load is light. The channel noise degrades the performance of both throughput and delay.