Patent ID: 7515571

Claim:
A bridging device for a bridging operation in a high-speed wireless personal area network (WPAN) system that includes a parent piconet having a plurality of devices, a child piconet using time slots allocated by the devices located in the parent piconet, said bridge device located in the child piconet broadcasts information about the devices of the parent piconet and information about the devices of the child piconet, and operates to perform a data transfer between a first specified device included in one piconet and a second specified device included in a second piconet, wherein a specified device included in the high-speed WPAN constructs a MAC (Media Access Control) header data structure for a data transmission that includes a piconet identification field comprising a source piconet identification (ID) field for indicating the piconet to which the specified device belongs, and a destination piconet identification (ID) field for indicating the destination piconet to which the destination device, to which the specified device intends to transmit data, belongs and said bridge device compares a value of said source and destination piconet identification fields to determine whether said data transmission remains within or is provided outside of said source piconet; and performs an operation that includes: receiving data from the first specified device; terminating a bridging operation with respect to the data if the value of the source piconet ID field is equal to the value of the destination piconet ID field; buffering the data if the value of the source piconet ID field is different from the value of the destination piconet ID field; receiving a time allocation message from the destination piconet, and transmitting the buffered data at a time allocated by the time allocation message.