Seamlessly interconnecting legacy IEEE 1394 devices over WiMedia UWB network: the mirroring bridge

Bridging IEEE 1394 buses is becoming important since it can be used to provide wireless connectivity among 1394 devices. Unfortunately, existing bridge mechanisms, such as the IEEE 1394.1 bridge and the transparent bridge, have practical limitations. The former does not support interoperability with legacy 1394 devices and the latter requires a new hardware chipset for bridge implementation. We thus propose a new bridge mechanism called a mirroring bridge to overcome these limitations. It supports interoperability with legacy 1394 devices by emulating remote nodes inside a bridge and via packet address translation that can be implemented through software. We have implemented the proposed bridge mechanism and have succeeded in interconnecting legacy 1394 devices over an experimental WiMedia UWB network. The experimental result showed that the average throughput of the mirroring bridge is 188.7 Mbps, which is 94.4% of the maximum throughput of the UWB chipset used.