A method performs a hybrid automatic repeat-request (HARQ) operation in a wireless orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) network. A quality of a channel between a transmitter and a receiver is estimated as an error metric. A packet for the HARQ operation is fragmented adaptively at the transmitter according to the estimated error metric. The fragmentation is performed at the HARQ layer when the error metric is less than a predetermined threshold, otherwise the fragmentation is performed at the MAC layer.