1

Wireless Personal Area Networks: Protocols and

Applications
Khaled A. Ali and Hussein T. Mouftah
School of Information Technology and Engineering
University of Ottawa
Ottawa, Ontario, K7L 3N6
{kali, mouftah}@site.uottawa.ca

I. I NTRODUCTION
As we gradually become surrounded by an increasing number of electronic devices, there is a growing demand for networking
them together in a manageable and preferably wireless fashion. Therefore, wireless personal area networks (WPANs), which operate
around a personal operating space (POS), are expected to play an essential part in the 4G communication systems by enabling short-
range wireless ad hoc connectivity. WPAN is a personal area network used for communication among devices such as telephones,
computer and its accessories, as well as personal digital assistants through wireless connections within a short communication range.
The reach of a PAN is typically within 10 meters. Technologies enabling WPAN include Bluetooth, ZigBee, Ultra-wideband(UWB),
IrDA, HomeRF, etc., in which the Bluetooth is the most widely used technology for the WPAN communication. Each technology is
optimized for specific usage, applications, or domains. Although in some respects, certain technologies might be viewed as competing
in the WPAN space, but they are often complementary to each other.
The IEEE 802.15 Working Groups is the organization to define the WPAN technologies. In addition to the 802.15.1 based on the
Bluetooth technology, IEEE proposed two additional categories of WPAN in 802.15: the low rate 802.15.4 (TG4, also known as
ZigBee) and the high rate 802.15.3 (TG3, also known as Ultra-wideband or UWB). The TG4 ZigBee provides data speeds of 20
Kbps or 250 Kbps, for home control type of low power and low cost solutions. The TG3 UWB supports data speeds ranging from
20 Mbps to 1Gbps, for multi-media applications.
In the following table, the main characters of the WPAN technologies as specified in the IEEE 802.15 are compared:

[?][?][?][?][?][?]. WPANs have some similarities with fixed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) [?] with some important differences.
For example, a WPAN is characterized by a small number of nodes and the specific group mobility pattern at pedestrian speeds.
However, WSN is composed of a large number of sensor nodes with a limited or static mobility.
Currently, two WPAN standards have been developed for advanced short-range wireless communications: IEEE 802.15.3 for High-
rate WPAN (HR-WPAN) and IEEE 802.15.4 for Low-Rate WPAN (LR-WPAN) [?][?]. The HR-WPAN defines the protocols and their
primitives for supporting high rate multimedia and data communications over a short-range transmission channel [?]. On the other
hand, LR-WPAN standard defines the protocols and their primitives for supporting low data rate communication also over a short-range
transmission channels [?]. A WPAN 1 network is featured with low cost and very low power consumption nodes, ease of installation,
reliable data transfer, and simple protocol structure[?]. In addition to the contention-based channel access mechanism, both of the
standards adopt the Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) for assigning one or more exclusive transmission slots to a single node
in order to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for the supported applications.
A WPAN consists of several nodes communicate over a wireless channel. One of these nodes is required to assume the role of the
network coordinator2 . The network coordinator starts the creation of a WPAN and allocates collision free time slots when requested
by network nodes. Also, it controls the association and disassociation process of a node to the network. The WPANs standards are
only defined for the physical and medium access control layers and are defined to operate over the industrial, scientific and medical
(ISM) frequency bands.
Following the standardization of the WPANs standards and their acceptance by the industry, the concept of WPANs communication
systems has become the focus of extensive research to provide an excellent introduction to the protocol stack, design requirements
and evolution to the drafts of the IEEE 802.15.3 and IEEE 802.15.4 standards [?][?]. Recently, the Medium Access Control
(MAC) sublayer has been extensively studied to evaluate the performance of the WPANs standard MAC protocols through
mathematical analysis and simulation as well as proposing and evaluating a new approaches to enhance and enrich these standards
[?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?][?].
1 From now on, WPAN is used for both HR-WPAN and LR-WPAN unless the discussion is specified for only one WPAN type in which its name will be explicitly
used
2 HR-WPANs is known as piconet and its network coordinator node name is Piconet coordinator (PNC). LR-WPAN network coordinator name is known as Personal
Area Network (PAN) Coordinator (PAN Coordinator)
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The recent merging technology of wireless communications at the personal operating space (POS) level has led the industry and
academia to develop a number of IEEE communication standards, such as IEEE 802.15.3 and IEEE 802.15.4a Ultra-wideband (UWB)
systems for high data rate communication systems , and IEEE 802.15.4 for low data rate communication systems. In a broad sense,
such systems are known as Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) which are designed for short communication range3 by wireless
devices of lower power consumption features. The IEEE standards for WPANs define the Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control
(MAC) layers. The networking functionality can be independently selected to suite the targeted application of the deployed WPAN;
i.e. Zigbee networks.
The WPANs applications spans over a broad spectrum of daily activity such as industrial automation, telehealth applications, home
automation, gaming, etc. These applications have heterogeneous Quality of Service (QoS) requirements; throughput, delay, bit error
rate, etc. Therefore, the WPAN to be deployed needs to take such requirements into consideration.
A collective study which presents up to date advancement in the domain of WPANs mostly needed and will be presented in a
professional and technical manner in this chapter. These material will be arranged into four parts:

II. WPAN S A RCHITECTURE AND C HALLENGES

In this section, the system architecture of the WPAN networks is explained. Then, the WPANs will be explained based on the
supported data rate; High Rate (HR-WPANs) and Low Rate (LR-WPANs). The different challenges encountering the deployment and
the operation of the WPANs will be outlined. Some proposed solutions of such challenges are discussed in the subsequent sections.

III. WPAN S A PPLICATIONS

The different anticipated WPANs applications will be discussed. The applications requirements and the network limitations in
providing such requirements will be investigated.

IV. WPAN S S YSTEM ACCESS M ECHANISMS

First, the Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) layers of the WPANs proposed by the IEEE standards will be
explained. Then the enhancements of the MAC protocol for overcoming some network and application challenges proposed in the
literature will be reviewed. Then, our recently proposed MAC protocols for WPANs will be explained in detail.

V. I NTERNETWORKING OF WPAN S AND OTHER C OMMUNICATION S YSTEMS

In this section, the requirements and challenges of internetworking WPANs and other communication systems such as Wireless
Local Area Networks (WLANs), Cellular Systems; such as Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS), IP networks will
be studied. Some proposed solutions will be reviewed and future directions will be given.

3 WPANs communication ranges from 10m-100m