Throughput fairness analysis of reservation protocols of WiMedia MAC

WiMedia standardized a fully distributed high data rate communication using ultra wideband (UWB) for wireless personal area networks (WPANs). WiMedia MAC provides asynchronous data communication service by Prioritized Channel Access (PCA) and isochronous service by Distributed Reservation Protocol (DRP). In this paper we propose three different approaches to analyze the reservation protocols, PCA and DRP, of WiMedia's Medium Access Control (MAC). In the first two approaches we keep the portions of the superframe fixed for DRP and PCA traffics while the third approach follows random reservation. To test out the throughput fairness of PCA and DRP traffic by proposed approaches we present a scenario of connected nodes and incoming nodes with mixed traffic (video, VoIP and best effort). By means of simulations using Omnet++, we show that the system offers higher throughput by using approach 3, which provides access to medium by Hard, Soft and PCA reservation. The throughput fairness is also estimated for the three approaches by using Gini index.