Dynamic adaptive frequency hopping for mutually interfering wireless personal area networks

As the wireless personal area network (WPAN) gets utilized by more individuals, the interference that collocated WPANs cause to each other, termed self-interference, will be one of the major sources that degrade WPAN's communication performance. The conventional adaptive frequency hopping (AFH) strategies avoid frequency-static interference by reducing the hopset, but this deteriorates the performance if there is also self-interference. In this paper, we propose dynamic AFH (DAFH) mechanisms that are concurrently employed by collocated WPANs in order to avoid the self-interference. With DAFH, WPAN adaptively self-allocates a subset of frequency channels to be hopped, such as to minimize the experienced interference. The packet error rate is the only input to the proposed mechanisms, which enables DAFH to also avoid interference from frequency-static interferer. The optimization of the throughput should not be the sole target of the DAFH because WPAN operates in unlicensed spectrum and arbitrary adaptation of the FH pattern may be harmful to proximate non-WPAN devices. Therefore, we define and adopt an etiquette rule to characterize the behavior of the collocated WPANs with DAFH as a single collective entity that produces interference. The operation of DAFH is robust and adaptive to the dynamic changes in the environment and to the noise errors in the channel. Simulation results show that DAFH significantly increases the throughput of the WPANs in presence of both self-interference and frequency-static interference, while the WPANs employ best effort to minimize changes in the overall interference pattern