Intelligent Channel Time Allocation in Simultaneously Operating Piconets Based on IEEE 802.15.3 MAC

The IEEE 802.15.3 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is designed to support low power and high rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs). It works on a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) basis within a piconet, which guarantees interference-free connections. However, the current protocol is not efficient for Simultaneously Operating Piconets (SOPs), which are linked by the parent/child (P/C) and parent/neighbor (P/N) relationships. It provides interference mitigation but the throughput is limited since the channel time is exclusively allocated. In this paper we propose Intelligent Channel Time Allocation (Intelligent CTA), which includes Public CTA and Normal CTA, to intelligently manage the inter-piconet interference (IPI). The proposed scheme is able to greatly reduce the IPI. Based on the DS-UWB system, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively support the coexistence of SOPs and it can achieve higher throughput without significant loss of link success probability (LSP) in the SOPs.