MaCC: Supporting network formation and routing in wireless personal area networks

This paper presents a novel effective scheme of configuring Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs), called Master-driven Connection Control (MaCC). WPANs are based on a new wireless technology, which enables portable and mobile computing devices, and consumer electronic appliances to communicate with each other. Assuming that WPANs operate in a master-slave style, we exploit the information about master-slave relationships for identifying a network topology in an ad hoc fashion. Specifically, MaCC supports routing, providing the minimum-hop paths that cannot be obtained by flooding algorithms. In addition, it constructs the optimal topology on demand along the minimum-hop paths dynamically, because the performance of routing is dependent on network topologies. These functions need only a few control messages to achieve, and so can avoid excessive message propagation by flooding causing frame collisions in the WPANs. MaCC has several prominent features: self-direction of every node, adaptive formation of networks, and minimization of hop counts for routing control. In this paper, we describe the details of MaCC and analyze its overhead about initialization, routing discovery, and reconfiguration. The results show control messages propagated in a MaCC network at route discovery are reduced to less than one half of those in a network utilizing pure flooding.