Performance Analysis of Prioritized MAC in UWB WPAN With Bursty Multimedia Traffic

Ultra-wideband (UWB) is expected to be the transmission technology of future wireless personal area networks (WPANs), carrying various multimedia streams. Recently, the WiMedia Alliance has launched its standard for UWB WPANs, where the prioritized channel access (PCA) protocol is specified to provide differentiated medium access control (MAC) in a distributed manner. For time-sensitive multimedia traffic, the total delay, including the frame service time and the frame waiting time, is an important metric for quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. This paper presents a performance analysis for the PCA protocol, considering the bursty nature of multimedia traffic. The mean frame service time and the mean waiting time of frames belonging to different traffic classes are obtained. Simulation results are given to verify the analytical results and demonstrate that the effect of the traffic differentiation mechanism in PCA is magnified when the interarrivals are highly bursty and correlated. In addition, the characteristics of multimedia traffic have a significant impact on the mean frame waiting time. Finally, our analytical model is applied to delay-sensitive traffic for QoS provisioning.