Hierarchical Downlink Resource Management Framework for OFDMA Based WiMAX Systems

IEEE 802.16, known as WiMAX, has received much attention for its capability to support multiple types of applications with diverse QoS requirements. Beyond what the standard has defined, radio resource management (RRM) still remains an open issue. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical downlink resource management framework for OFDMA based WiMAX systems. Our framework consists of a dynamic resource allocation (DRA) module and a connection admission control (CAC) module. DRA emphasizes on how to share the limited radio resources in term of subchannels and time slots among WiMAX subscribers belonging to different service classes with the objective of increasing the spectral efficiency while satisfying the diverse QoS requirements in each service class. CAC highlights how to limit the number of ongoing connections preventing the system capacity from being overused. Through system-level simulation, it is shown that the proposed framework can work adaptively and efficiently to improve the system performance in terms of high spectral efficiency and low outage probability.