Several burst construction algorithms for orthogonal frequency division multiple access were proposed. However, these algorithms did not meet the downlink burst characteristics specified in the IEEE 802.16 standard. This article therefore proposes the best corner-oriented algorithm (BCO). BCO not only complies with downlink burst characteristics, but also considers the three issues to obtain high throughput, as follows: BCO maintains all free slots as a continuous area by constructing each burst in the corner of the available bandwidth area for minimizing external fragmentation; BCO shrinks the burst area to minimize internal fragmentation, if the requested bandwidth has been satisfied; and for exploring the continuous subchannels with good channel quality, BCO ensures that the burst adopts an optimal modulation coding scheme by selecting the excellent corner that can generate the maximal throughput. The simulation results indicate that BCO achieves 2-9 times the throughput achieved by the previous algorithms under a heavy load.