Opportunistic Spatial Reuse in IEEE 802.15.3c Wireless Personal Area Networks

The IEEE 802.15.3c wireless personal area network (WPAN) standard is designed to support highly directional wireless communications at the 60-GHz frequency band. Highly directional communications are helpful to reduce interference; hence, great potentials are provided for aggregate network throughput improvement via spatial reuse (SR). However, in 802.15.3c WPANs, the SR is limited in use since the 802.15.3c standard does not specify an explicit procedure for the SR. We design a new and simple scheme exploiting the SR, thus improving aggregate network throughput. In the proposed scheme, the 802.15.3c devices measure and report the measured channel status. Then, a controlling device, which is called the piconet coordinator (PNC) in the 802.15.3c WPAN, schedules resources available for each device. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme contributes to significant aggregate network throughput improvement. The proposed scheme is so simple that it can be easily employed for practical 802.15.3c devices. In addition, it is guaranteed to work well without conflicting with existing 802.15.3c operations.