RF Coverage extension for wireless home networking systems

摘要

The RF coverage area of a heterogeneous home networking system (100a) installed within a building which is constituted by a number of wired (102d) and/or wireless local area networks (102a,b,c,e) connected to a wired backbone (106) that comprises a number of wired-to-backbone bridges (109) and wireless-to-wired bridges (112a-e) to the backbone (106) is extended. A method comprises the steps of allocating (S0a) a number of wired and/or wireless transmission channels and bridging (S0b) between home network media elements of different multimedia data types on allocated transmission channels at a predefined layer of the underlying protocol stack. Using (S1) a common media access control (MAC) layer for the entire home networking system (100a) for accessing (S2) different backbone media (106) thereby allows simple integration (S2') of different types of home network media elements interconnected by said home networking system (100a). This media access control (MAC) layer is controlled by a central backbone controller ( mu C) and appears to the outside world as one overall controlling instance. In contrast to the state of the art, the invention uses different physical (PHY) layers on the backbone media and the wireless local area networks (102a,b,c,e) for mapping (S4) the PHY-layer representation of an RF signal transmitted via an allocated RF transmission channel of a wireless local area network (102a,b,c,e) connected to the home networking system to an IF signal on a backbone medium of the wired Ethernet LAN (106), combines home network media elements of different multimedia data types on the RF/PHY layer and thus enables an extension of the RF coverage area without the need of new frequency resources or loss of bandwidth. Each wireless-to-backbone bridge (112a,b,c,e) thereby comprises a PHY-layer conversion stage (304) for mapping the PHY-layer representation of an RF signal transmitted via an allocated RF transmission channel of a wireless local area network (102a,b,c,e) to a signal on a backbone medium (106). <??>The controlling instance of the backbone (104) and the wired backbone (106) can be a Powerline communication system which is specially adapted to use the IF spectrum of an RF signal received via an allocated RF transmission channel of a wireless local area network (102a,b,c,e) on the mains. <IMAGE>