A New Beacon Mechanism for 60 GHz Wireless Communication Networks

This paper proposes a new beacon mechanism for 60 GHz wireless communication networks that can greatly reduce beacon overhead caused by omni-directional transmission. Short common beacon with low-rate omni-directional transmission and individual beacon with high-rate directional transmission are combined to carry all required information in the conventional beacon. A short common beacon may only include part of the physical layer preamble, or preamble with physical layer header or plus MAC header to reduce the beacon transmission time. Numerical analysis verified that the proposed beacon scheme can improve MAC efficiency significantly.