A Novel Piconet Coordinator Selection Method for IEEE802.15.3-Based WPAN

Power awareness is an essential component of wireless personal area networks (WPANs), due to the limited energy stored in battery-operated equipment. Moreover, a WPAN has to deal with coexistence problems, since it may simultaneously operate over many types of network. Especially, when UWB, which is a candidate PHY technology for IEEE802.15.3-based WPANs, is applied, decreasing the transmission power is necessary to meet the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulation and diminish interference to other communication systems. In a WPAN, the Piconet coordinator (PNC) acts as an important role for central controller of the whole Piconet. As specified in the standard, IEEE802.15.3, the most capable device in a Piconet could be dynamically selected as the PNC in terms of the capacity of devices. However, the standard does not explicitly define the capacity function. In this paper, a novel PNC selection method, named Least Distance Square PNC (LDS-PNC) selection for IEEE 802.15.3-based WPANs is proposed. Using the proposed selection method, the transmission power can be lessened, and the interference area introduced by PNCs can be diminished as well. The simulation results show that it has power-saving and interference mitigation characteristics.