Virtual time-slot allocation scheme for throughput enhancement in a millimeter-wave multi-Gbps WPAN system

This paper proposes a virtual time-slot allocation (VTSA) scheme for throughput enhancement to realize a multi-Gbps time division multiple access (TDMA) wireless personal area network (WPAN) system in a realistic millimeter-wave residential multipath environment. TDMA system without time-slot-reuse mechanism conventionally allocates one TDMA time-slot to only one communication link at a time. In the proposed VTSA scheme, taking advantage on the large path loss in the millimeterwave band, a single TDMA time-slot can be reallocated and reused by multiple communication links simultaneously (hence the name virtual), thus significantly increasing system throughput. On the other hand, allowing multiple communication links to occupy the same time-slot causes the generation of co-channel interference (CCI). The cross layer VTSA scheme is therefore designed to be able to maximize the throughput improvement by adaptively scheduling the sharing of time-slots, and at the same time monitor the potential performance degradation due to CCI. As a result, it is found that the VTSA scheme is capable of improving system throughput as much as 30% in both AWGN and multipath channels (line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environment). Additionally, by coupling with higher-order modulation schemes, the system is able to achieve up to a maximum throughput of 3.8 Gbps. It is also observed that higher-order modulations although have higher maximum achievable throughput in low CCI environment, the tolerance against increasing CCI is considerably lower than that of the lower-order modulations.