Power Aware Multi-hop Packet Relay MAC Protocol in UWB Based WPANs

Ultra wide band (UWB) technology will be applied in the high rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs) for its high rate, low power, and innate immunity to multipath fading. In this paper, a power aware multi-hop packet relay MAC protocol in UWB based WPANs is proposed and a power aware path status factor (PAPSF), which is derived from SINR and power resource condition of each device, is used to select a suitable relay node. Compared with relaying by piconet coordinator (PNC), which is easily chosen by other ad hoc routing protocol, the new scheme can achieve higher throughput, decrease the time required for transmitting high power signal and we can easily distribute the battery power consumption from PNC to other devices in the piconet to prevent the PNC device using up its battery too fast and finally avoid PNC handover too frequently.