An enhanced high-rate WPAN MAC for mesh networks with dynamic bandwidth management

A mesh-enabled WPAN (mesh-WPAN) built on the standard IEEE 802.15.3 MAC allocates channel time node by node along a route. This allocation causes unnecessary packet delays, which is not desirable for multimedia-dominating scenarios. Also, the variability of wireless link may result in relaying nodes´ starvation or buffer overflow. In this work an enhanced MAC protocol for high-rate mesh-WPAN named group relay and token solicitation (GRATS) is proposed. Group relay enables dynamic channel time sharing among the nodes along a route. Token solicitation allows for temporarily adjusting the number of packets in a group. Both mathematical analysis and simulation results show that the GRATS not only solves the relaying nodes´ starvation and buffer overflow problems, but also reduces average packet delay noticeably. Simulation results also show that the GRATS outperforms the IEEE 802.15.3 MAC significantly for delay bounded VBR video traffic in terms of job failure rate