Service Differentiation Techniques for WiMAX systems in Emergency Marine Scenarios

The wireless nature of WiMAX combined with its ability to provide high transmission rate and guarantee Quality of Service (QoS), makes this technology very attractive in emergency scenarios where it is impossible to deploy a wired network and where it is strongly important to have a mechanism for traffic differentiation which ensures quality of service. In this context, this thesis provides a study for the analysis and the development of scheduling algorithms for WiMAX systems, which maximize network efficiency and at the same time have a traffic differentiation mechanisms for ensuring quality of service. These studies were carried out by simulation analysis, which showed that the algorithms developed in this work improve significantly the performance of algorithms already proposed in the literature for WiMAX systems. This work also presents an experimental study performed on a real test-bed for verifying the feasibility and the performance that a WiMAX system would have in a emergency scenario. In particular, this work considered a marine emergency scenario. The experimental results showed that WiMAX is able to meet the above requirements for a emergency scenario and with considerable benefits.