Abstract—In order to extend the coverage of wirelesscommunication to metropolitan scale, the Worldwide Interoperabilityfor Microwave Access (WiMAX) standard wasdeveloped and ratified as the IEEE 802.16d standard inJune 2004. The standard defines an adaptive modulationframework which allows a WiMAX system to communicatewith various burst profiles according to the link quality.The selection mechanism of a suitable burst profile is leftopen for research. In this paper, we devised a novel linkadaptation algorithm with dynamic threshold probing basedon an extension of our previous work on a MIMO-basedWiMAX systems simulation framework. Our algorithm wascapable of quickly adapting to channel conditions using PHYlayer metrics and MAC layer statistics. Evaluation showedthat our algorithm could achieve high system throughputwhile minimizing the packet drop rate significantly.

Index Terms—WiMAX, link adaptation, MIMO, algorithm,cross-layer design

Cite: Tsz Ho CHAN, Mounir HAMDI, Chui Ying CHEUNG, and Maode MA, "A Link Adaptation Algorithm in MIMO-based WiMAX systems," Journal of Communications, vol. 2, no. 5, pp. 16-24, 2007.