A new distributed decision making scheme for the IEEE 802.15.3 Parent/Child model

In an IEEE 802.15.3 Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN), an extension of the communication area by the formation of a multi-piconet is one of the most challenging issues. The standard defines a Parent/Child architecture with a centralized decision making. The parent PicoNet Coordinator (PNC) takes exclusively the decision of accepting a child piconet creation request or not. In this paper, we propose an efficient Parent/Child formation algorithm with a distributed decision. As a result, a PNC capable device is now able to check the available resources in the parent superframe. Consequently, it can decide whether to send a private Channel Time Allocation Request (CTRq) to create its own child piconet or not. For the algorithm evaluation, we have developed an IEEE 802.15.3 Parent/Child model. Simulation results show that our approach significantly succeeds to push a distributed fashion in forming this type of topologies.