Third-Party Handshake Protocol for Efficient Peer Discovery and Route Optimization in IEEE 802.15.3 WPANs

Designed for high data rate wireless personal area networks, the IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) protocol fits well with emerging technologies like ultra-wideband. Peer discovery is essential in 802.15.3 piconets in which devices (DEVs) exchange MAC frames in a peer-to-peer manner. If two peer DEVs are unreachable, the standard peer discovery method will fail after unproductive backoff retransmissions, and a costly network layer routing is required. For DEVs uniformly distributed over the maximum coverage area of a piconet, such failures occur in up to 41.3% of intra-piconet peer discoveries. In this paper, we propose a novel third-party handshake protocol (3PHP) that provides more reliable and prompt peer discovery than the standard method. Especially, between directly unreachable DEVs within the same piconet, 3PHP replaces network layer routing by an efficient MAC layer forwarding that utilizes the available self-learning rate information to establish optimal routes. The mean peer discovery time for 3PHP is 100 2s lower than the standard method between directly reachable DEVs. More significantly, between directly unreachable DEVs within the same piconet, 3PHP has a much lower failure probability, and is up to 10 times faster than the standard method in establishing a peer-to-peer connection as the latter fails and network layer routing is invoked.