Efficient forwarding scheme for downlink broadcast messages in IEEE 802.16j multi-hop relay networks

Although the IEEE 802.16j standard introduces a connection identifier (CID)-based forwarding scheme and a tunnel-based forwarding scheme, these schemes exhibit poor performance when forwarding broadcast messages. This study considers a CID translation strategy and proposes two CID-translated forwarding schemes for IEEE 802.16 multi-hop relay networks. The basic CID-translated forwarding scheme does not require to append the relay MAC header of the tunnel-based scheme to the broadcast messages. The enhanced CID-translated forwarding scheme further divides a broadcast message into a common part and a specific part and forwards these parts in a multicast manner and a broadcast manner, respectively. Simulation results validate that the basic CID-translated forwarding scheme uses fewer resources than the tunnel-based forwarding scheme. Moreover, the enhanced CID-translated forwarding scheme outperforms the basic CID-translated forwarding scheme in terms of the system resources used and transmission latency.