Adaptive Resource Sharing among Uncoordinated Collocated Wireless Personal Area Networks

WING A Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) establishes disposable, ad hoc connections in order to facilitate local interactions among devices situated within short range (usually 10 meters). WPAN provides the user with ad hoc networking among his/her portable devices, as well as communication links to other WPANs or fixed wireless access points. Due to its focus to the localized communications and the need for ubiquitous usage, the WPAN technology must use the unlicensed spectrum as an essential communication resource. Therefore, the WPAN must use some techniques that will enable several collocated WPANs to coexist and to use the same unlicensed spectrum. In particular, we are interested in the case when the WPANs are not able to exchange information so as to coordinate the spectrum usage (e.g. in a TDMA or FDMA manner). The Bluetooth technology, which is the first closest approximation of the envisioned WPAN concept, operates in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed ISM band and it uses pseudorandom frequency hopping (FH). However, if the number of collocated independent Bluetooth connections increases, the interference experienced by each connection may be severe. The goal of this activity is to design and evaluate distributed algorithms that will minimize the interference among collocated WPANs. This is achieved by applying adaptive frequency hopping, which relies on the information of the errors experienced on the FH channel. (Petar Popovski, Hiroyuki Yomo)