Performance evaluation of channel access protocols in overlapping ECMA-368 Wireless Personal Area Networks
Holger Rosier, Klaus Sambale · 2012
Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) as well as Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) like Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) are known to provide stable distributed channel access for multiple users. The wide acceptance of wireless systems operating in licensed-exempt frequencies demands for efficient spectrum usage of the scarce radio resources. In partially overlapping network scenarios where channel reuse becomes possible, the non-deterministic behavior prevents random access protocols from exploiting substantial reuse gain. This paper studies the performance of the Distributed Reservation Protocol (DRP) and the Prioritized Contention Access (PCA), a CSMA/CA Protocol, as specified in the Ultra Wideband (UWB) standard ECMA-368. The focus is in particular on channel reuse efficiency and the given result motivates to use DRP to substantial improve spectrum efficiency in scenarios, where a minimal reuse distance is desired. It is shown, that a gain of more than 50% is attained due to the deterministic channel access of DRP in comparison to PCA in partially overlapping network scenarios.