A Downlink Data Region Allocation Algorithm for IEEE 802.16e OFDMA

IEEE 802.16e specifies a connection-oriented centralized medium access control (MAC) protocol, based on time division multiple access (TDMA), which adds mobility support to the MAC protocol defined by the IEEE 802.16 standard for fixed broadband wireless access. To this end, orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) is specified as the air interface. In OFDMA, the MAC frame extends over two dimensions: time, in units of OFDMA symbols, and frequency, in units of logical sub-channels. The base station (BS) is responsible for allocating data into the MAC frames so as to meet the quality of service (QoS) guarantees of the admitted connections of the mobile stations (MSs). This is done on a frame-by-frame basis by defining the content of map messages, which advertise the position and shape of data regions reserved for transmission to/from MSs. We refer to the latter operation as data region allocation. In this paper, we propose a sample data region allocation algorithm (SDRA), and we evaluate its performance by means of Monte Carlo analysis. The effectiveness of SDRA is assessed in several scenarios, involving mixed voice over IP (VoIP) and best effort MSs, different modulations, and frequency re-use plans.