Directional MAC Protocol for Millimeter Wave based Wireless Personal Area Networks

Recently, up to 7 GHz license-free spectrum around 60 GHz has been allocated worldwide for high data rate wireless communications. This enables the deployment of WPANs at 60 GHz for short-range multimedia applications up to gigabits per second. In this paper we propose a new scheme to increase the efficiency of MAC layer protocol for WPANs at 60 GHz when directional antennas are used. Our scheme is based on an adaptation of the current IEEE 15.3 standard MAC protocol for WPANs on two aspects. Firstly, we propose a rate-adaptation based scheme to coordinate the directional and omni-directional transmissions in WPANs. Secondly, we propose a novel channel time allocation algorithm, which enables spatial reuse TDMA. The analytical results reveal that our algorithm significantly increases the system capacity.