Efficient coupled PHY and MAC use of physical Bursts in WiMAX/IEEE 802.16e networks

We address several issues related to the efficient use of Bursts in WiMAX/IEEE 802.16e systems. We look on the relation between the PHY layer budding blocks (FEC blocks) and the allocation of MAC level frames (PDUs) over these FEC blocks. In particular, we show how to transmit a given amount of MAC level data bits over a given Burst in order to maximize the number of successfully transmitted data bits in the Burst. We also compute, given an amount of data bits to transmit, what is the Burst size that maximizes each of the following three performance criterion: the number of successfully transmitted data bits in the Burst, the maximum ratio between the number of successfully transmitted data bits to the Burst size, and the number of successfully transmitted data bits per PHY slot. For the first problem the paper shows how to optimally divide the Burst into PDUs and shows that sometimes it is more efficient to use less reliable Modulation/Coding schemes. For the second problem the paper shows that using the PHY slots efficiently is the best criterion to consider.