Optimizing the WiMedia Frame Structure for Home Networking Applications

We focus on a new class of home networking applications that enable wireless communication between multimedia devices using the WiMedia MAC protocol. Applications like streaming video from DVD players to HDTVs, generate high data rates and can easily saturate the bandwidth even at the rates provided by UWB transmissions. Thus we need to enhance the MAC layer to improve bandwidth utilization and efficiently handle the requirements of such applications. In this paper, we propose a new TDMA frame structure for the WiMedia MAC protocol that uses the specific characteristics of the traffic to minimize MAC and PHY overhead while providing delay bounds within the tolerable limits of the applications. Our results show that the proposed frame structure can provide up to 10% increase in bandwidth utilization over the WiMedia frame structure and achieve a throughput gain of about 48Mbps at the highest data rate of the MB-OFDM physical layer.