Full-Duplex Transmission on the Unidirectional Links of High-Rate Wireless PANs

Abstract

The IEEE 802.15.3 WPAN(Wireless Personal Area Network) has been designed to provide a very high-speed short-range transmission capability with QoS provisions. Its unidirectional channel allocations for the guaranteed time slots, however, often result in a poor throughput when a higher layer protocol such as TCP requires a full-duplex transmission channel. In this paper we propose a mechanism, called TCP transfer mode, that provides the bidirectional transmission capability between TCP sender and receiver for the channel time allocations(CTAs) of the high-rate WPAN. As our scheme does not require additional control messages nor additional CTAs, the throughput of a TCP connection on the high-rate WPAN can be greatly improved. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms any possible ways of TCP transmission according to the current standard of the WPAN.

This work has been supported in part by the Research Grant of Kwangwoon University in 2004, and in part by the Ubiquitous Autonomic Computing and Network Project, the MIC 21st Century Frontier R&D Program in Korea.