Efficient Resource Utilization for Heterogeneous Wireless Personal Area Networks

Wireless personal area networks (WPANs) will play an important role in next-generation communication networks. Currently, two technologies are being considered for the physical layer of WPANs, based on the two ultra wideband (UWB) standards, namely, multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) UWB and direct-sequence (DS) UWB. The coexistence issue of these two types of WPANs in the same coverage area, raises new issues and introduces new problems which should be dealt with to avoid performance degradation. In particular, efficient radio resource management (RRM) in such environments is challenging. Indeed, the coexistence of heterogenous UWB based WPANs (UPANs) has an ad hoc nature, which requires RRM approaches that are different from traditional infrastructure-based ones. In this paper, we propose new algorithms for two RRM modules in heterogeneous UPANs, namely, radio access technology (RAT) selection and vertical handoff (VHO). To improve the overall performance of the system, our design considers possible narrowband interference (NBI) in the environment as well as the link outage probability, in the decision process. We also provide an analytical model based on a 4D Markov process to study the system in equilibrium and derive the performance metrics, namely, the new-call and handoff-call blocking probabilities, throughput and average carried traffic. Numerical results and comparisons show that our design achieves enhanced performance in terms of throughput and grade of service (GoS). key words: radio resource management, heterogeneous networks, MBOFDM, DS-UWB, vertical handoff, grade of service