Energy Consumption of Beacon Period Extension and Contraction in Distributed Medium Access Control

Ultra-wide band (UWB) is a promising physical layer technology which potentially enables low power and high rate devices with applications for wireless personal area networks (WPANs) and for wireless body area networks (WBANs). The UWB technology considered in this paper, called multiband UWB, is based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). Any physical layer technology requires a medium access control (MAC) protocol to be coupled with. This paper focuses on a distributed time division multiple access (TDMA) MAC protocol to support high data rate applications, developed within the WiMedia Alliance (2005). The aim of this paper is to study the dynamic beacon period extension and contraction when a newcomer device joins a existing beacon group (BG) and to evaluate the related energy consumption