Traffic estimation for centralized resource allocation in meshed High Data Rate WPANs

High Data Rate (HDR) Meshed Wireless Personal Area Networks (MWPANs) primarily use TDMA as the medium access mechanism. The Mesh Piconet Coordinators (MPNCs) need to reserve channel time slots for inter cluster and intra cluster communication in a superframe shared by MPNCs in the transmission vicinity of each other. In case of distributed channel reservation schemes for single flows, the issues of increased control traffic overhead and channel reservation conflicts can arise. To realize the possibility of using a centralized channel reservation scheme for the MPNCs to reserve channel time in bulk (more than one flow) for its current queued traffic as well as expected inter cluster and intra cluster flows, the need of using traffic estimation schemes becomes mandatory. A traffic estimation scheme based on the Matrix Balancing (MB) problem has therefore been proposed for the MPNCs to predict their total cluster traffic requirements. Simulation results are provided that prove the superiority of the proposed approach when compared with simple mean based estimations.