MiniMesh

Abstract

This paper proposes MiniMesh, an opportunistic transmission mechanism for the IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) protocol; a key technology to realizing wireless personal area networks (WPANs). MiniMesh exploits the varying channel conditions to devices in a WPAN, thereby enabling the sender and receiver of a flow to transmit at high data rates when the channel condition is favorable. In addition, MiniMesh addresses the coverage problem that limits peer-to-peer communications and is backward compatible with the IEEE 802.15.3 specification. We have implemented MiniMesh and the DS-UWB physical layer that offers data rates ranging from 28 Mbps to 1 Gbps in the ns-2 simulator. Our results show devices obtain at least a three fold increase in throughput when only the piconet controller is serving as a relay; further increases are possible with additional relays. Moreover, a flow experiences faster recovery from packet loss and is able to maintain a high throughput even when channel conditions worsen.