Enabling multi-hop on mmWave WPANs

The booming multimedia applications are demanding multi-hop communications in high data rate millimeter wave radio WPANs (Wireless Personal Area Networks). However, unable to make use of space reuse, the IEEE 802.15.3 dependent piconet scheme shows its limit when the number of inter-connected piconet grows. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a bridging device - the via to setup multi-hop link across multiple piconets. A mini-superframe scheme, different switching strategies and a rendezvous scheme have been adopted and investigated. The simulation result shows this proposed approach has great potential to support the fast route discovery in high data rate multimedia applications.

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