Extending WPANs to Support Multi-Hop Communication with QoS Provisioning

Wireless personal area networks (WPANs) usually have very limited coverage. In this paper, we focus on methods to extend this range through multi-hop communication crossing several inter-connected WPANs called piconets. Multi-hop communication between piconets is possible through the bridge devices. While extending the range of WPANs, bridge devices become the capacity bottlenecks for these connected piconets. Therefore, an unoptimized resource allocation mechanism involving the bridges could degrade system performance severely. In this work we propose a novel resource allocation mechanism that outperforms other schemes proposed so far. Moreover, our scheme is QoS aware due to its cross-layer design. In our proposed scheme, resource allocation cooperates with the route discovery process to mitigate collisions due to inter-piconet resource reservations. Simulation results show that our approach significantly increases network capacity. This work is expected to pave the way for QoS support in WPANs.