Seamlessly Interconnecting Legacy IEEE 1394 Devices over UWB Network: The Mirroring Bridge

Bridging IEEE 1394 buses is becoming important since it enables wireless connectivity. Unfortunately, existing bridging mechanisms, such as the IEEE 1394.1 bridge and the transparent bridge, have practical limitations. The former does not support interoperability with legacy 1394 devices and the latter requires a new hardware chipset for bridge implementation. We thus propose a mirroring bridging mechanism to overcome these limitations. It supports interoperability with legacy 1394 devices by emulating remote nodes inside a bridge and via packet address translation that can be implemented in software. We have successfully implemented the mirroring bridge mechanism and conducted extensive experiments. The average throughput of the mirroring bridge was 188.7 Mbps, which is 99.3% of the maximum throughput of the UWB network.