Decreasing the MAP overhead in the IEEE 802.16 OFDMA system

One of the key performance bottlenecks of existent 802.16 systems is the downlink signalling overhead. It is caused by the MAP messages that carry information on the data burst allocations. To decrease the MAP overhead, the 802.16 standard proposes a few mechanisms, such as the compressed MAP and sub-MAPs. However, similarly to the scheduling discipline, an exact algorithm to construct sub-MAPs is not specified and is left open for alternative implementations. In this paper, we study 802.16 sub-MAPs and propose an algorithm to construct an optimal sub-MAP configuration for the given burst allocations. We show that sub-MAPs can improve the system performance by almost 25%.