Heuristic Burst Construction Algorithm for Improving Downlink Capacity in IEEE 802.16 OFDMA Systems

IEEE 802.16 OFDMA systems have gained much attention for their ability to support high transmission rates and broadband access services. For multiuser environments, IEEE 802.16 OFDMA systems require a resource allocation algorithm to use the limited downlink resource efficiently. The IEEE 802.16 standard defines that resource allocation should be performed with a rectangle region of slots, called a burst. However, the standard does not specify how to construct bursts. In this paper, we propose a heuristic burst construction algorithm, called HuB, to improve the downlink capacity in IEEE 802.16 OFDMA systems. To increase the downlink capacity, during burst constructions HuB reduces resource wastage by considering padded slots and unused slots and reduces resource usage by considering the power boosting possibility. For simple burst constructions, HuB makes a HuB-tree, in which a node represents an available downlink resource and edges of a node represent a burst rectangle region. Thus, making child nodes of a parent node is the same as constructing a burst in a given downlink resource. We analyzed the proposed algorithm and performed simulations to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with existing algorithms. Our simulation study results show that HuB shows improved downlink capacity over existing algorithms.