Performance analysis of wireless LAN with two-hop relaying

Hot spot service based on wireless LANs is expected to play an important role in the beyond 3G wireless networks. Although spatial coverage is very limited, a comfortable and higher speed compared with a cellular system is available there. However, there might exist nodes that cannot communicate directly with an Access Point (AP) because of the distant location or the shadowing due to obstacles. Accordingly, the introduction of two-hop relaying to the hot spot is useful to extend the coverage and avoid the dead spot. However, the throughput per node is getting decreased as the hot spot coverage area increases. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a scheme to reuse the same channel spatially wherever possible and apply it to the HiperLAN/2 based wireless LAN hot spot with two-hop relaying to compensate for the decrease of the throughput per node. Namely, we modify the HiperLAN/2 protocol in such a way that a time slot is reused at the nodes spatially separated far enough not to cause packet collision. Thus, the throughput is expected to be improved and confirmed by a theoretical analysis and computer simulations.