Dynamic adaptation of contention window for consumer devices in WiMedia home networks

WiMedia ultra-wideband technology is an attractive transmission solution for high-data-rate multimedia streaming and high-quality consumer electronic devices in wireless multimedia home networks. However, the contention-based protocol of WiMedia medium access control (MAC) may cause channel collisions and throughput degradation as the number of consumer devices in the network increases. In order to resolve this problem and to reduce channel access latency, we propose a dynamic adaptation of contention window (DACW) scheme in which the contention window size for the optimal transmission probability is derived after traffic information has been obtained by means of distributed beaconing procedures. The trace-driven simulation results demonstrate that the DACW scheme outperforms the existing channel access schemes (i.e., prioritized channel access) in WiMedia MAC under different situations, especially when the number of contending nodes is large.