Radio communication repeater, a radio communication system and method

A radio communication repeater for operating in a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) radio communication system with a plurality of time slots to communicate packets, each packet comprising a recipient identifier, the repeater comprising:

• a transmitter configured to transmit a plurality of the packets in a transmit time slot assigned to the repeater;
• a receiver configured to receive a plurality of the packets from all other time slots of the TDMA radio communication system other than the transmit time slot assigned to the repeater, and to store the received plurality of the packets in a receive buffer;
• a cache buffer configured to store packet identifiers (PID) of the received plurality of the packets;
• and
• a controller configured to:
• i) read the received plurality of the packets from the receive buffer according to a First In, First Out (FIFO) method;
• ii) check whether each of the received plurality of the packets has been already received by the repeater and if so, disregard the already received packet and if not, direct the packet for transmission, and, if the received plurality of the packets have different recipient identifiers, to forward the received plurality of the packets to a transmit buffer for transmission by the transmitter in the transmit time slot assigned to the repeater as a frame comprising the plurality of packets having different recipient identifiers;
• and
• iii) copy, from the receive, buffer to the transmit buffer, the plurality of the packets having the packet identifier (PID) that is different than the packet identifiers (PID) stored in the cache buffer and to add the packet identifier (PID) of each of the copied plurality of the packets to the cache buffer.