Quality of service provisioning for WiMAX and its integration with GEPON

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Quality of Service (QoS) support in the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), or IEEE 802.16e standard, and in its integration with Gigabit Ethernet Passive Optical Network (GEPON) to become which is called GEPON and WiMAX integration network. In wireless domain, WiMAX is a broadband access technology which satisfies substantial increase in demand for high speed and ubiquitous Internet access. In optical domain, GEPON is a promising fiber-based access technique which is expected to provide a cheap solution to broadband access due to the ubiquitous deployment of Ethernet-based network equipment. Therefore, the integrated WiMAX and GEPON network can take advantage of the bandwidth benefit of fiber communications, and the mobile and non-line-of-sight benefits of wireless communications. This integration network enables fixed and mobile convergence and is expected to significantly reduce overall design and operation costs of new-generation broadband access networks. In the GEPON and WiMAX convergence network, throughput and Quality of Service (QoS) in term of end-to-end delay are the most important performance metrics. In the scope of this dissertation, we focus on the QoS support for the converged GEPON and WiMAX network. In the WiMAX and GEPON convergence network, the communications between Mobile Subscribers Stations (MSSs) or Subscriber Stations (SS) are still purely the communications between original users in WiMAX. For WiMAX, energy management in order to extend the lifetime of MSS so that the WiMAX can support mobility is the most important issue, because the energy of mobile device mainly depends on battery. In WiMAX, the energy saving objective is done by employing sleep-mode operations in MSS. However, the reduction of energy consumption results in unacceptable frame response delay or jitter which can be unacceptable for many delay sensitive applications, such as voice and video conference services, i...