ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the media access control (MAC) layer of WirelessMAN standards and focuses on Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.16. While the IEEE 802.16 standard is the most important and promising WirelessMAN technology, European Telecommunications Standards Institute and Telecommunications Technology Association of South Korea have also developed their own WirelessMAN standards. Transmissions are described by service flows and connections in IEEE 802.16. A transport service that provides the transmission of MAC protocol data units (PDU) between two nodes is called a SF. The MAC overhead resulting from packing and segmentation subheaders can be decreased by selecting an ideal MAC PDU size. Also the size of the MAC PDU affects the performance of the automatic repeat request mechanism. MAC PDUs are responsible for their own quality of service (QoS) constraints in the mesh mode. There are no QoS parameters set with connections in the mesh mode.
