Feedback-assisted MAC protocol for real time traffic in high rate wireless personal area networks

During the past decade, there has been much standardization effort for indoor or shot-range networks, as communication devices and applications for such networks populate. As a prominent example of these activities, the IEEE 802.15.3 Task Group (TG) published a standard for high-rate wireless personal area network (HR-WPAN). To support strictly timed multimedia services, the TG adopts a time-slotted channel access protocol controlled by a central device (DEV). Although the channel time allocation algorithm plays a key role in deciding the network performance, it remains unspecified in the standard. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel feedback-assisted channel time allocation method for HR-WPAN. After initial channel times are allocated based on packet inter-arrival time statistics, the allocation is dynamically adjusted by utilizing feedback information from each DEV. The feedback information includes the buffer status, the packet transmission delay, and the physical transmission rate. By utilizing this feedback information, the central DEV can allocate sufficient channel time for transmissions of pending packets from a DEV. Moreover, the allocated channel times can be synchronized to the packet arrival times so that the overall transmission delay is reduced. To cope with time-varying wireless channels, a dynamic rate selection algorithm assisted by physical layer information is proposed in this paper. Performance evaluation is carried out through extensive simulations, from which significant performance enhancements are observed. © 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.