A New Air Interface Concept for Wireless Multimedia Communications beyondthe 3rd Generation

Abstract

This paper presents a new air interface concept for wireless multimedia communications beyond the 3rd generation. The proposed air interface uses the same physical layer as that of ETSI HiperLAN/2 and IEEE 802.11a supporting transmission rate up to 54 Mb/s to form a W-CHAMB (Wireless CHannel-oriented Ad-hoc Multihop Broadband) network. Unlike HiperLAN/2, that is based on a central control, W-CHAMB is a self-organizing network without any central control. The responsibilities of organizing and controlling of W-CHAMB are fully distributed among wireless stations themselves. A channel-oriented MAC protocol that is based on the dynamic channel reservation (DCR) is proposed for W-CHAMB. Energy signals (E-signals) are used to realize distributed access priorities of wireless stations, to solve the hidden station problem and to achieve a MAC level acknowledgment (ACK) for a fast ARQ. The multihop traffic performance of IEEE 802.11a and W-CHAMB is intensively evaluated stochastically based on a prototypical implementation of the protocols. The superiority of the multihop traffic performance with W-CHAMB can be seen in comparison with IEEE 802.11a.