A Novel Random Access Mechanism for OFDMA Wireless Networks

Random access is critical to OFDMA wireless networks. However, due to special features of an OFDMA system, how to carry out random access in an efficient manner is still an open issue for OFDMA wireless networks. In this paper, a new random access protocol is proposed for OFDMA wireless networks. It is distinguished by a novel mechanism called concurrent multi-channel carrier sense multiple access (CM-CSMA/CA). Simulation results show that the new random access protocol is highly efficient in uplink access and also significantly outperforms existing random access protocols for OFDMA wireless networks.