Optimal Radio Resource Partition for Joint Contention- and Connection-Oriented Multichannel Access in OFDMA Systems

The IEEE 802.16e world interoperability for microwave access (WiMax) system plays an important role in the future wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN). Orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA), adopted in the IEEE 802.16 e WiMax system, has many advantages in the physical layer, but also poses many challenges for radio resource allocation. One of interesting radio resource allocation issue in the OFDMA system is to partition the overall radio resource (bandwidth and time duration) into two portions: one for random access and the other for connection-oriented access. In the IEEE 802.16 e WiMax system, a truncated binary backoff algorithm is adopted to resolve the contention in random access, while the time-division OFDMA is used for the connection-oriented access. The main contribution of this paper is to design an analytical approach to determine the optimal amount of reserved radio resource in both time and frequency domains for random access, with the objective of maximizing the overall efficiency of radio resource while satisfying the delay requirements for supporting real-time services. Furthermore, an analytical model for calculating the access latency and the efficiency of the reserved radio resources is developed.