Performance evaluation of point-to-multi-point (PMP) and mesh air-interface in IEEE standard 802.16a

Broadband wireless access has gained a lot of attention during lately. At the same time, multi-hop communication is expected to become a major technology in systems beyond 3G. The IEEE standard 802.16a provides either high speed wireless access or multi-hop capabilities through the two air-interfaces investigated, point-to-multipoint (PMP) mode and mesh mode. The mesh mode already supports multi-hop communications, so the design of PMP has been extended in order to adapt this air-interface to support multi-hop. The performances of mesh and PMP mode are compared by means of an analytical evaluation of their efficiency, or, equivalently, the overhead introduced by the MAC layer protocol. For typical multi-hop scenarios with a low number of connections, the mesh mode performs slightly better than the PMP mode. To validate the analytical derivation, the performance for the mesh air-interface is also derived by event-driven simulations.