Peer-to-peer communication in wireless local area networks

A new MAC protocol which supports peer-to-peer direct communication is introduced for a packet switched wireless network. Terminals that are located within range of each other and are sufficiently isolated from the base station can communicate with their peers directly without the use of the base station as a relay. Slotted Aloha is used as the access protocol. Throughput and delay of the protocol are evaluated. Numerical results are presented which show that significant improvements in throughput/delay performance can be obtained over a system using slotted Aloha without peer-to-peer communication