Non-saturated Analysis of the Contention-Based Access in WiMAX

Broadband wireless communications are an important need. WiMAX is a technology that provides wireless connectivity. Even if this standard envisages several mechanisms for quality of service support, best effort traffic class is analyzed here since it still represents an important percentage of the traffic load. This is the reason why this paper provides an analytical study of the contention-based access scheme. In particular, an embedded Markov chain model is proposed to describe the system in non-saturated conditions. This approach permits to take into account the behavior of subscriber stations queues as well as the queues of transmission requests received at the BS. We also integrated in the model the round robin policy for the service of stations. The analytical model results have been compared with simulation results in terms of several quantities of the model. We expect that this approach can be used for the optimized selection of access parameters.