The recent Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) transmission technique is gaining popularity as a preferred technology in the Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) emerging standards. In standards 802.16-2004 and 802.16e, the basic allocation units are comprised of sub-channels and OFDMA time symbols; each sub-channel is a group of sub-carriers, so that all the sub-channels are considered equally adequate to all users. We study the naturally arising new approach of two-dimensional mapping of incoming requests into the matrix that represents the system resources, where each allocation is of an arbitrary multi-rectangular shape (to the best of our knowledge, this approach has not been discussed elsewhere). We define a cost model and constraints related to practical OFDMA systems, which depend on the spatial shape of the two-dimensional allocation; the main objective function is the spatial efficiency. We show that the arising problem, even in its simplest form, is NP-hard [1]. We present run-time efficient heuristic solutions for various mapping problems, taking into account the above QoS and OFDMA related constraints. In particular, a novel solution for two-dimensional mapping under priority constraints is suggested. Extensive simulations with parameters of real systems were used to investigate the performance of the proposed solutions in terms of throughput, delay and system load. The results show that high throughput can be achieved with relatively simple mapping algorithms. We believe that the proposed two-dimensional mapping approach is prospective, due to its fitness to modern standards.
