Efficient management of multiple piconets in an MC-CDMA-based UWB system

With multiple overlapped piconets, the IEEE 802.15.3 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol uses a Parent/Child (P/C) or Parent/Neighbor (P/N) configuration to avoid inter-piconet interference. However, the throughput of a P/N or P/C configuration cannot exceed that of a single piconet. In the present paper we propose an efficient means of managing multiple piconets to cooperate with a Multi-Carrier Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) based UWB system. The proposed management approach uses an Intermediate Device (IDEV) to connect Piconet Coordinators (PNCs). A senior PNC adaptively arranges two simultaneous data transmission links with the proposed spreading matrices in each Channel Time Allocation (CTA) instead of a P/C or P/N configuration, which supports only a single link in each CTA. Simulation results demonstrate the proposed scheme can achieve a higher throughput with an acceptable compromise of link success probability in multiple overlapped piconets.