IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO.

1, JANUARY 2012 27
A Subchannel Renumbering Scheme for IEEE 802.16 OFDMA Systems
Kuei-Ping Shih, Member, IEEE, Hung-Chang Chen, Member, IEEE, Sheng-Shih Wang, Member, IEEE,
Chau-Chieh Chang, and Chi-Tao Chiang, Student Member, IEEE
AbstractThis letter proposes a subchannel renumbering
(SCR) scheme to improve frequency resource utilization in IEEE
802.16 OFDMA systems. SCR rearranges the logical subchannel
numbers to derive a group of contiguous subchannels with a
high burst prole such that BS can allocate these subchannels to
MSs to enhance system throughput. Simulation results validate
that SCR can achieve higher subchannel utilization and system
throughput, compared with the existing approaches.
Index TermsData Burst, IEEE 802.16, OFDMA, Subchannel
Numbering, WiMAX.
I. INTRODUCTION
I
N IEEE 802.16 OFDMA systems, the radio resource is
viewed as a two-dimensional region, composed of symbol
time in time domain and subchannels in frequency domain.
The unit of downlink and uplink resources that base stations
(BSs) allocate to mobile stations (MSs) is called a burst, which
should be identied in the form of a rectangle, especially
for downlink trafc. The burst prole (BP) accounts for
the description of bursts using numerous specic parameters
in terms of modulation, repetition, and coding. From the
viewpoint of frequency domain, BSs are likely to allocate
contiguous subchannels with a high burst prole to MSs to
increase the success of downlink transmission.
In IEEE 802.16 OFDMA systems, the frequency spectrum
is divided into multiple orthogonal subcarriers, and several
subcarriers are collected to form a subchannel, which is
indexed by a logical subchannel number [1]. The IEEE 802.16
Spec. species several subchannelization schemes to map from
subcarriers to subchannels to provide interference averaging or
multiuser diversity gain. Nevertheless, the subchannel num-
bering is not mentioned at all in the standard. If using an
improper subchannel numbers, the BS is most likely to allocate
the subchannels with a low BP to MSs, thereby degrading the
system throughput.
As the subchannel numbers can be logically rearranged,
this letter proposes a subchannel renumbering (SCR) scheme
to determine proper permutation of subchannel numbers such
that BS can allocate contiguous subchannels with a high BP
to MSs to improve the system performance. SCR constructs a
Manuscript received July 30, 2011. The associate editor coordinating the
review of this letter and approving it for publication was S. Gupta.
K.-P. Shih (corresponding author), C.-C. Chang, and C.-T. Chiang are with
the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang
University, Tamshui 251, Taipei, Taiwan (e-mail: kpshih@mail.tku.edu.tw).
H.-C. Chen is with the Department of Information Technology, Ching Kuo
Institute of Management and Health, Keelung, Taiwan.
S.-S. Wang is with the Department of Information Management, Minghsin
University of Science and Technology, Hsinchu 304, Taiwan.
The work was partially supported by the National Science Council of the
Republic of China under Grant NSC 100-2221-E-032-028.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LCOMM.2011.110711.111644
weighted undirected complete graph, where vertices indicate
the subchannels, an edge between two vertices means that
the two subchannels are arranged contiguous, and the weight
on the edge means the prot gained from the contiguous
arrangement. Based on these weights, SCR heuristically nds
a maximum weight Hamiltonian path that visits each vertex
of the graph exactly once, and then regards the sequence
of subchannels in this path as the result of the subchannel
renumbering.
The subchannel renumbering is inherently accomplished
before allocating bursts, and thus SCR can be associated with
existing burst allocation mechanisms. On the other hand, this
study, instead of designing a new subchannelization scheme,
focuses on introducing an efcient subchannel renumbering
scheme to assist the subchannelization schemes in allocating
radio resource efciently. To our best knowledge, this letter is
the rst to discuss the practicability of subchannel renumber-
ing on subchannelization schemes in IEEE 802.16 OFDMA
systems. Simulation results show that, compared with other
schemes, SCR not only improves the subchannel utilization,
but also increases the system throughput.
The rest of this letter is organized as follows. In Section II,
the proposed subchannel renumbering scheme is presented.
The performance evaluations are depicted in Section III.
Finally, Section IV concludes this letter.
II. THE PROPOSED SUBCHANNEL RENUMBERING SCHEME
Let

be the total number of MSs and

the total number

of subchannels in the system. All MSs are denoted as

,
= 1, 2, ...,

and all subchannels are logically denoted as

, = 1, 2, ...,

. Let the number of burst proles BSs

can support be

. Each BP is identied by a unique burst

prole index (BPI). All supported BPs are denoted as

, =
1, 2, ...,

. Without loss of generality, a smaller value of BPI

means a lower burst prole.
To support an elegant subchannel numbering, making the
subchannels with the highest BP contiguous is an efcient
design from the viewpoint of a single MS. Apparently,
the optimal solution can be derived using a simple brute-
force approach [2], which searches all the combinations of
subchannel numbering sequence of MSs. However, it is an
impractical strategy due to a high computational complexity.
Using this approach to the problem causes (

!) time
complexity. Therefore, we propose a heuristic approach to nd
the subchannel number sequence such that the subchannels
with higher BP are more likely to be contiguous.
As the channel conditions in different subchannels for
different MSs are all different, we use an

BPI mapping
matrix, denoted as , to record the most efciently BPI that
1089-7798/12$31.00 c 2012 IEEE
28 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 1, JANUARY 2012
BS can support for each MS on each subchannel. The element
in , indicated as
,
, 1

and 1

, stands for
the index of the higher BP used on

for

. According
to this mapping matrix, BS constructs a weighted undirected
complete graph, = (, ), where () is the set of all
subchannels (vertices), and () is the set of all edges,
,
(1 ,

, = ). Each edge is assigned a weight to

indicate the prot of the edge. In this study, this prot is
measured according to the number of MSs that BSs can serve
using the highest BP, because SCR intends to maximize the
prot such that most of the subchannels with the highest BP
are contiguous for most of MSs. Let
,
denote the weight
on
,
. According to the concept mentioned above,
,
is
designed as follows.
Let

,
denote the number of MSs using

as the
highest BP under the constraint that

and

are
logically adjacent, where 1

. It is formulated as

,
= {

min(
,
,
,
) = , 1

}. A
large value of

,
indicates more MSs can be served by

.
Note that using different BPs on a subchannel achieves distinct
throughput gains. To identify the inuence of distinct BPs on
weighted values, this study introduces a measurement, denoted
as .
,
is formulated as follows, which is similar to the
design of positional notation used in numeral systems.

,
=

=1

,

1
. (1)
In Eq. (1),

,
with different levels of BPs are considered
to get
,
. In order to make the adjacent subchannels and
with the most number of MSs supporting higher BP can
have higher weight, the measurement is used to increase
the weight on
,
. For example, if

,
>

,
,
,
>

even though
1
,
<
1

. The proposed SCR scheme uses

the number of MSs (e.g.,

) as this measurement and derives

a weight matrix, denoted as

. Note that is also the

adjacency matrix of and is symmetric. The time complexity
of the construction of is (
2

).
In this letter, we argue that the sequence of the optimal
subchannel numbering is equivalent to the vertex sequence
of the maximum weight Hamiltonian path of the weighted
undirected complete graph . Actually, dynamic programming
(DP) approach is an alternative strategy to the problem. Let
(V(G), , ) be the the cost of the maximum weight path that
starts at , ends at , and includes all vertices in (){, }.
The recurrence relation can be dened as:
( (), , ) = max
(){,}
{
,
+( (){}, , )}, , ().
(2)
When ( () 2, ( (), , ) =
,
. Compared with
the brute-force approach, the DP approach reduces the com-
putational overhead to (2

2
). To achieve time cost
effectiveness, this letter further proposes a heuristic approach,
subchannel renumbering scheme (SCR), as shown in Algo-
rithm 1.
Let be the sequence of subchannels after renumbering and
be the set of indices of unvisited subchannels. Moreover, the
two ends of currently derived Hamiltonian path are denoted
and for ease of description. Initially, is empty and
Algorithm 1: SCR: Sub-Channel Renumbering Scheme.
// Performed by BS before burst allocation.
Input: // Adjacency matrix of .
Output: // Sequence of subchannels after renumbering.
begin
= {1, 2, . . . ,

} ;
(, ) = arg max
(,)

,
, , ,
,
;
= (, ) ;
= {, };
while = do
= arg max

,
, ,
,
;
= arg max

,
, ,
,
;
if
,

,
then
= ;
// Append to the front of . = {} ;
= ;
else
= ;
// Append to the rear of .
= {} ;
= ;
end
= {1, 2, . . . ,

}. The rst step of SCR is to nd the

element with the maximum value in . This means that
selecting the subchannels corresponding to the element can
guarantee more MSs being served by a high BP and, thus, we
arrange these two subchannels to become contiguous. That is,
becomes (, ) and and are removed from . Meanwhile,

,
becomes one of constituent edges of the maximum weight
Hamiltonian path. Then, the next step is to extend the current
path by selecting an additional vertex at a time. This step
is performed repeatedly until all vertices are visited (i.e.,
is empty). Recall that the two ends of the currently derived
path are and . We select the vertex from all the adjacent
vertices of with the largest weight value and denote this
vertex as . The adjacent vertex of with the largest value of
weight is also selected, and it is denoted as . If
,

,
,
SCR adds in the front of . Otherwise, it adds in the
rear of . Meanwhile, this vertex should be removed from
. As all subchannels are added to sequentially, the time
complexity of SCR is (
2

), which is a great reduction in

time complexity.
III. PERFORMANCE EVALUATIONS
This study conducts extensive simulations to evaluate the
performance of SCR. Table I shows the simulation settings.
Simulation results are averaged over 30 runs. We introduce
an index, denoted as , to represent the benet derived from
a given sequence of subchannel numbers. Let

denote the
total number of frames. This index is dened as
=

=1

=1

,+1
()

,
where
,+1
() ( 1) is
,+1
in frame , and it can be
obtained according to Eq. (1). A higher value of means
a better performance. As shown in Fig. 1, the index value
increases as the number of MS increases. This is because the
weight of edges in the graph is proportional to the number of
MSs, and absolutely dominates this index value. Signicantly,
the proposed SCR scheme provides a better result and gains
SHIH et al.: A SUBCHANNEL RENUMBERING SCHEME FOR IEEE 802.16 OFDMA SYSTEMS 29
TABLE I
SIMULATION PARAMETERS.
Parameter Value
Frame size 5 ms
Number of subchannels 16
Symbol time duration 100.8
Number of symbol time for Downlink/Uplink 29/18
Packet size 64 Bytes-1518 Bytes
Number of BPs 3
Simulation time 100000 frames
Fig. 1. Simulation results in terms of benet index ().
20% improvement on average against the original without
applying SCR. Moreover, SCR can reach up to 89.7% of the
optimal value resulted from DP.
To show the performance gain of SCR, we further val-
idate SCR coupled with numerous existing burst allocation
mechanisms, such as Raster [3], BCPMS [4] and SDRA [5].
Because SCR rearranges the subchannel numbers to make the
subchannels with the highest BP be contiguous, applying SCR
before using these allocation mechanisms results in a superior
system throughput, as shown in Fig. 2. In addition, this study
uses a service ratio, dened as the ratio of the number of
MSs that BS can serve to the total number of MSs, to present
the performance of SCR from the viewpoint of users. Fig. 3
depicts that more MSs can be served if considering SCR
in burst allocation mechanisms due to efciently rearranging
subchannel numbers.
In summary, the system performance of all the burst al-
location mechanisms we compare are indeed improved if
incorporating with the proposed SCR scheme. We reason that
rearranging the subchannel numbers according to subchannel
quality benets the system performance in terms of throughput
and service ratio. The system throughput and service ratio of
burst allocation with consideration of SCR achieve approxi-
mately 88.1% and 87.4% of the optimal solution, respectively,
although the gain of throughput or service ratio derived from
SCR decreases as the number of MS increases.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this letter, a novel subchannel renumbering scheme,
named SCR, is proposed to improve frequency resource uti-
lization in IEEE 802.16 OFDMA systems. SCR rearranges
the logical subchannel numbers by making the subchannels
5 10 15 20 25 30 35
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
18
20
Number of MSs
S
y
s
t
e
m

T
h
r
o
u
g
h
p
u
t
(
M
b
p
s
)


SDRA+SCR
SDRA
SDRA+DP
Raster+SCR
Raster
Raster+DP
BCPMS+SCR
BCPMS
BCPMS+DP
Fig. 2. Simulation results in terms of system throughput.
5 10 15 20 25 30 35
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Number of MSs
S
e
r
v
i
c
e

R
a
t
i
o

(
%
)


SDRA+SCR
SDRA
SDRA+DP
Raster+SCR
Raster
Raster+DP
BCPMS+SCR
BCPMS
BCPMS+DP
Fig. 3. Simulation results in terms of service ratio.
with the highest burst prole become contiguous. Based on
a heuristic strategy, SCR can shorten the response time of
systems and achieve cost effectiveness. Simulation results
validate that SCR scheme can increase the system throughput
and improve the subchannel utilization.
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