A gating mechanism for border node assisted association of wireless personal area networks

IEEE 802.15.4 based Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) are envisioned to play a vital role in the application centric ubiquitous networks. In IEEE802.15.4 networks, the use of non-interfering logical channels in multiple PANs, operating in a Personal Operating Space (POS) ensures to control the scope of PAN-directed broadcasts, reduce received energy per PAN device, and minimize interference at the physical layer. At the downside the inter-PAN communication is not possible with this setup as PANs in the same region remain unaware of each other’s presence. This situation hinders sharing information of common interest amongst PANs and accessing infrastructure networks hopping through multiple PANs. In this paper, we present a comprehensive architecture enables neighboring PANs to communicate by diffusing into each other through border nodes. The basic idea is to time share logical channels to perform a gating operation by border nodes. Our contribution includes detection of border nodes, discovery of neighboring PAN(s), a common channel based gating protocol, interest diffusion and inter-PAN data transfer. We mathematically analyze the proposed architecture and carry out simulations in Network Simulator (ns2) for performance evaluation. Our simulations show that the proposed architecture gives optimal performance when multiple border nodes are able to perform gating. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2193-1801-1-12) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.