An efficient TDMA based MAC frame structure in OFDM systems

The general frame structure of current orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems is based on the reservation-based time division multiple access (TDMA). The TDMA frame consists of a number of bursts, which are the transmission formats of the physical layer. Since the OFDM/TDMA uses broad bandwidth consisting of a large number of narrow bands, even the size assignment for the smallest burst is so large that a good throughput cannot be expected where a fine granularity is required. In this paper, we suggest an idea to obtain fine granularity effectively and to improve the system throughput greatly.