Adaptive point-to-point communication approach for subscriber stations in broadband wireless networks

Abstract

The point-to-multipoint (PMP) mode is considered the well-adopted transmission type that is supported by the IEEE 802.16 standard. The base station (BS) is served as the centralized coordinator to control and forward packets for the subscriber stations (SSs) within the network. In the case that two SSs intend to conduct packet transmission, it is required for the packets to be rerouted to the BS before arriving at the destination SS. The communication bandwidth is apparently wasted due to the rerouting processes. In this paper, an adaptive point-to-point communication (APC) approach is proposed to achieve direct communication between SSs within the PMP mode of the IEEE 802.16 standard. The BS is coordinating and arranging specific time intervals for the two SSs that are actively involved in packet transmission. Based on channel conditions among the BS and the SSs, the packet transmission operation is switched between direct communication and indirect communication in the APC approach. Both the architectural design and analytical modeling of the proposed scheme are conducted in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed APC approach in terms of user throughput and its corresponding overhead can be observed via both the analytical and simulation results.