Increasing the VoIP capacity of WiMAX systems through persistent resource allocation

It is expected that future IMT-Advanced systems will operate packet-switched due to the dominance of data services. However, it is inherent to packet-switched systems to not cope well with voice services. In this paper, we present a simple Persistent Resource Allocation (PRA) scheme that greatly increases the Voice-over-IP (VoIP) capacity of such type of systems by reducing the signaling overhead for resource allocations. PRAs are assigned per VoIP connection and are valid for a fix number of frames. Resource allocations for succeeding frames have to be signaled by new PRAs. This supersedes any procedures for revocation of PRAs and associated error handling. The technique is applicable to all packet-switched systems but within our work we focus on WiMAX systems. The analytical evaluation presented in this paper confirms the potential of this technique.