Performance analysis of delayed acknowledgment scheme in UWB-based high-rate WPAN

The wireless personal area network (WPAN) is designed for short-range connectivity among fixed or portable moving devices. The ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is being defined as the physical-layer (PHY) support for the high-rate WPAN. At medium access control (MAC) layer of the WPAN, a delayed acknowledgment (Dly-ACK) or burst-ACK (B-ACK) scheme is introduced to improve the channel utilization by reducing the overhead of ACK. In this paper, the authors first study the delay performance of the Dly-ACK scheme. An analytical model is developed for the Dly-ACK mechanism, and the delay is decomposed into queuing delay and delivery delay. These delay metrics are derived, and some important observations are obtained. In particular, there exists an optimal burst size, which is determined by the input traffic load and is very insensitive to the channel error rate within a normal error-rate range. It is also demonstrated that Dly-ACK cannot work properly if the burst size is fixed. The authors then propose a dynamical Dly-ACK scheme that can adaptively change its burst size according to the queue buffer size. Simulation results show that the dynamical scheme can improve the delay performance significantly.