Performance analysis of dynamic OFDMA systems with inband signaling

Within the last decade, the orthogonal frequency- division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission scheme has become part of several standards for wireless systems. Today, OFDM is even a candidate for fourth-generation wireless systems. It is well known that dynamic OFDMA systems potentially increase the spectral efficiency. They exploit diversity effects in time, space, and frequency by assigning system resources periodically to terminals. Informing the terminals about new assignments creates a signaling overhead. Up to now, this overhead has not been taken into account in studies on dynamic orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing access (OFDMA) systems. Yet this is crucial for a realistic notion of the performance achieved by dynamic approaches. In this paper, we close this gap. We introduce two forms of representing the signaling information and discuss how these affect system performance. The study of the signaling impact on the performance is conducted for an exemplary dynamic approach. We find that the throughput behavior of dynamic OFDMA systems is significantly influenced by the signaling overhead. In many situations, neglecting the overhead leads to wrong performance conclusions. Also, the performance difference between dynamic and static schemes is now much more sensible to the specific parameter set of the transmission scenario (e.g., frame length, subcarrier number, etc.). This leads to the proposal of access points which should adapt certain system parameters in order to provide optimal performance.