• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.31 no.2B
• /
• pp.117-128
• /
• 2006

For the legacy IEEE 802.15.3 WPAN protocol, an unpredictable piconet coordinator(PNC) leaving from a piconet without a proper handoff procedure causes an absence of PNC, and thus the piconet gets collapsed. In addition, several beacons from PNCs in adjacent piconets may be collided on a device(DEV) located between those piconets. This beacon collision eventually makes the DEV leave from the piconet. To remedy these two problems, we here propose an Active Seamless Coordinator Switching(ASCS) scheme and a PNC HB based Beacon Alignment(PHBA) one. In the ASCS scheme, a PNC assigns a number of DEVs as next possible PNCs in sequence for provisioning against the abrupt breakdown of the current active PNC. Each nominated DEV proactively sends a probe frame to confirm the operation status of the active PNC. For the case of no response from the PNC, the nominated DEV tries to become a new PNC immediately. In the second PHBA scheme, each PNC is allow to broadcast a special Heart Beat(HB) frame randomly during a superframe period. When a DEV receives a HB frame from other PNC, it promptly sends the related PNCs a special Hiccup Beat(HCB) frame with the superframe information of its associated PNC. As a result, the HCB frame makes both PNCs align their superframe beginning time in order to yield no more beacon collisions. For these two proposed schemes, we show the performance by simulations. We can confirm the enhancement of throughput for each superframe and average frame transfer delay, since each scheme can reduce the duration of piconet collapse. Finally, it is worth while to note that the proposed schemes can be operated with frames those are permitted in the legacy WPAN standard.