Mitigating the amount of overhead arising from the control signaling of the IEEE 802.16 OFDMa system

Abstract

This work focuses on mitigating the amount of overhead arising from the control signaling of the IEEE 802.16 system. It analyses existent solutions and proposes efficient methods and algorithms. Although existent IEEE 802.16 standard proposes some techniques, it is worthwhile to point out that exact implementation is not specified and left open for alternative implementations. The first part of this work addresses the main aspects of MAC layer overhead. The second part of this work introduces efficient techniques to improve the performance of ARQ mechanism. It is shown that the ARQ mechanism can improve significantly the performance of TCP based applications and confirms that a correct configuration plays an important role in transmitting data over wireless channels in the IEEE 802.16 OFDMa system. It is also of the view that the proposed solutions in this work must be verified by means of extensive simulations, and therefore each proposed method and algorithm is implemented and tested within the WINSE simulator in the NS-2 framework.