Patent ID: 7400642

Claim:
A method of an access terminal for controlling an operational state of a medium access control layer in a broadband wireless access communication system, the method comprising the steps of: performing an uplink access of a contention-based scheme to an access point using resources required to perform the uplink access according to the contention-based scheme when data to be transmitted is detected in an access state; receiving resources required to perform an uplink access of a contention-free scheme from the access point in a case of failing to be allocated a bandwidth by the access point after the access point receives the uplink access of the contention-based scheme; and performing a state transition from the access state into a traffic state in a case of receiving the resources required to perform the uplink access of the contention-free scheme, and performing the uplink access of the contention-free scheme to the access point using the received resources in the traffic state.