The University of British Columbia

Designed for high data rate wireless personal area networks, the IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) protocol fits well with emerging technologies like ultra-wideband. Peer discovery is essential in 802.15.3 piconets in which devices (DEVs) exchange MAC frames in a peer-to-peer manner. If two peer DEVs are unreachable, the standard peer discovery method will fail after unproductive backoff retransmissions, and a costly network layer routing is required. For DEVs uniformly distributed over the maximum coverage area of a piconet, such failures occur in up to 41.3% of intra-piconet peer discoveries. In this paper, we propose a novel third-party handshake protocol (3PHP) that provides more reliable and prompt peer discovery than the standard method. Especially, between directly unreachable DEVs within the same piconet, 3PHP replaces network: layer routing by an efficient MAC layer forwarding that utilizes the available self-learning rate information to establish optimal routes. The mean peer discovery time for 3PHP is 100 mu s lower than the standard method between directly reachable DEVs. Morel significantly, between directly unreachable DEVs within the same piconet, 3PHP has a much lower failure probability, and is up to 10 times faster than the standard method in establishing a peer-to-peer connection as the latter fails and network layer routing is invoked.