A MAC protocol for wireless personal area networks

Abstract

This paper proposes several extensions to IEEE Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) MAC protocol in order to enable a more robust and flexible solution to WPANs and sensor networks. Specifically, four extensions are proposed: a priority access period is added to handle emergency data transmission needed in some use cases, a scheduling protocol to resolve beacon transmission conflict between multiple WPANs operating in the same vicinity, a resource reservation protocol for interference- free data communication in a tree-topology WPAN, and a network alignment method to coordinate multiple coexisting unsynchronized WPANs.