8.1 Introduction

In this chapter, some important 802.16 MAC functions and other MAC parameters are described. These functions and parameters will be used in the following three chapters, after which the MAC Layer of WiMAX will have been completely described. These functions may sometimes be complex. This is due to the two main objectives foreseen: to have a high bandwidth use efficiency and to provide full malleability for the QoS management.

First the MAC addresses and MAC frames format are described. Then, some MAC procedures such as fragmentation, packing and concatenation, ARQ and HARQ are revised. Basic, primary and secondary management connections are introduced. The TLV encoding often used in 802.16 is also introduced.