Point-to-point direct communications for subscriber stations in IEEE 802.16 PMP networks

The point-to-multipoint (PMP) mode is supported in the medium access control layer of 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, a point-to-point direct communicable (PDC) approach is proposed to achieve direct communication among the 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. The effectiveness of the proposed PDC scheme can be observed via the simulation results. The PDC approach outperforms the conventional scheme within the IEEE 802.16 PMP networks in terms of the network throughput.