Survey of Down Link Data Allocation Algorithms in IEEE 802.16 WiMAX

IEEE 802.16 standard and its marketing technology Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) is one of the leading technology that gain benefit of adopting orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) as its multiple access technique. OFDMA gives flexibility in resources allocation to accommodate a large number of users supporting several services classes with quality of service (QoS). This loads big challenges on its resource allocation. One of the key performance factors of OFDMA resource allocation is its downlink data packing mechanism. In IEEE802.16 standard based OFDMA the downlink data is packed into down link frames in the form of rectangular slots called burst.The standard leaves details of packing mechanism as an open issue for researchers and manufacturer to implement. Therefore recently several algorithms have been proposed in literature. This paper endeavours to identify key factors and tradeoffs issues associated with designing of downlink data packing algorithm for WiMAX based IEEE802.16 through a competitive survey of recent proposed algorithms.