Deterministic Channel Access in WiMedia MAC Protocol

Abstract

WiMedia MAC protocol supports fully distributed data communications in high data rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs). WiMedia MAC includes a distributed reservation protocol (DRP) for synchronous traffic and a prioritized contention access (PCA) protocol for asynchronous traffic. Since PCA is based on the carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) mechanism, it suffers from low throughput due to collision, especially when the number of devices is large. In this paper, we propose a novel channel access scheme called deterministic channel access (DCA), which determines the transmission order among devices by means of beacon frames. Since all devices follow the deterministic transmission order, collision-free channel access can be achieved and thus the throughput can be significantly improved. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that DCA outperforms PCA in terms of throughput under different situations.