Relay with deflection routing for effective throughput improvement in Gbps millimeter-wave WPAN systems

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In this paper, we propose a deflection routing scheme that improves effective throughput (defined as the successfully transmitted bits over the duration between two available sequential time slots) of millimeter-wave wireless personal area network (mmWave WPAN) systems. The upcoming mmWave WPAN is based on dynamic time division multiple access (TDMA) and designed to guarantee Gbps-order transmission capability for high definition TV (HDTV) transmission, high speed wireless docking and gaming, etc. The decode-and-forward (DF) type of relay offers a simple solution to the issues of mmWave WPAN systems, such as limited coverage range and unexpected blockage. However, due to the required extra time, DF relay on the other hand decreases the effective throughput, and may not be sufficient to satisfy the requirement of the above data-rate-greedy applications. Inspired by the fact that the significant path loss of a millimeter-wave environment can provide good space isolation, we propose a deflection routing scheme to improve the effective throughput by sharing time slots for direct path with relay path. Based on the sub-exhaustive search, a routing algorithm, named as best fit deflection routing (BFDR), has been developed to find the relay path with the least interference that maximizes the system throughput. To reduce the computational complexity of the BFDR, we have also developed a sub-optimal algorithm named as random fit deflection routing (RFDR). The RFDR algorithm finds the sub-optimized relay path, where the interference may not be the least but is sufficiently low to guarantee the concurrent transmissions. Computer simulations show that, in realistic 60 GHz environments, the effective system throughput can be improved up to 28% under grid topology and 35% under random topology. RFDR achieves almost the same order of throughput improvement with only 10% of the computational complexity of BFDR.