Bandwidth allocation in UWB WPANs with ECMA-368 MAC

The new ECMA-368 MAC for UWB WPANs consists of two channel access methods: the distributed reservation protocol (DRP) and prioritized contention access (PCA). The exact method of medium access slot (MAS) allocation in DRP is not specified in the standard. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, the paper describes a distributed resource allocation method in which a number of interference–avoidance rules are used to reserve slots for devices. Devices maintain sending and receiving tables to track activities in the neighbourhood. The proposed method is a simple, effective solution to the DRP MAS allocation problem, avoiding reservation conflicts and interference from hidden terminals. Secondly, for VBR MPEG-4 video traffic, we propose a bandwidth requirement calculation method based on traffic prediction. In the proposed scheme bandwidth is allocated based on accurate traffic predictions, therefore matching network resources to the traffic demand. Application QoS is maintained while network utilization is kept high. Furthermore, the simple, adaptive linear predictor does not incur much computation overhead. Simulation results have demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed prediction algorithm and effectiveness of the bandwidth allocation method.