A collaborative coexistence mechanism for IEEE 802.15.3 and 802.15.4 WPANs

Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) are short-range ad-hoc networks centered around a person that make use of unlicensed bands for data transmission. Two complementary types of standards have been proposed by IEEE working groups for both High Data Rate (HDR) and Low Data Rate (LDR) WPANs. However, because of the unlicensed nature of WPANs, interference issues exist between uncoordinated WPANs. These interference issues are particularly severe when two or more nodes are closely located (e.g. in a multimode LDR/HDR device). This paper proposes a novel collaborative coexistence mechanism named Alternating Wireless Activity (AWA, patent pending) between a HDR WPAN based on the standard IEEE 802.15.3 and a LDR WPAN based on the standard IEEE 802.15.4. The AWA coexistence mechanism does not require any modification to the mentioned standards because it exploits their already available features.