QoS Provisioning and Radio Resource Allocation in OFDMA Based WiMAX Systems

Overview

Broadband Wireless Access based on the IEEE 802.16 suite of standards is quickly gaining importance as the basis for 4G technology, with the capability of providing high data rate QoS provisioned services for static as well as highly mobile users. Amongst the different PHY layers in the specification, Orthogonal Frequency Division based Multiple Access (OFDMA) is likely to emerge as the preferred PHY, due to the flexibility it offers to the system designer. The standard does not specify the resource allocation technique to be used in the system but leaves this open to allow vendors to differentiate their products. Since scheduling over OFDMA throws open a number of interesting and novel problems, the paper discusses different aspects of this issue in this paper.