Intra-superframe power management for IEEE 802.15.3 WPAN

Power management (PM) is critical for the portable devices in IEEE 802.15.3 wireless personal area networks (WPAN). Due to the property of TDMA based MAC of 802.15.3, one of the key issues for PM is to schedule the order of the multiple streams among multiple users to minimize the total wakeup times. In this paper, we reveal that this PM problem is in general a Hamilton path problem. With the aid of graph theory, we derive the lower bound and upper bound for the minimum wakeup times. Then, an efficient MDS (min-degree searching) algorithm is proposed to find the suboptimal order. The simulation results show that the MDS algorithm is usually near-optimal and can actually achieve the lower bound in most cases and performs much better than the existing approach.