Full-duplex transmission on the unidirectional links of high-rate wireless PANs

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.