Performance evaluation of DRPNext in ECMA-368 wireless personal area networks

Wireless devices are broadly adopted to the digital home environment, not least through integration of radios to Consumer Electronics (CEs) like TV screens or portable multimedia equipment. Accompanied by growth in wireless devices, demand on data rate increases, imposing new challenges on Medium Access Control (MAC) to improve channel access efficiency. Ultra Wideband (UWB) ECMA-368 offers very high data rate for short range communication. Two MAC protocols are standardized, the random based Prioritized Contention Access (PCA) and the Distributed Reservation Protocol (DRP), which is known to gain efficient channel access without data frame collision even in densely populated wireless network scenarios. Radio frequency signals propagated in the wireless channel are distorted and attenuated from obstacles. Particularly in home environments furniture and walls lead to not completely meshed network scenarios, thus raising the impact from hidden and exposed nodes on system capacity. The achievable throughput from gaining channel access concerning DRP channel access is not affected in presence of hidden nodes, whilst exposed nodes in wireless network scenarios lower system capacity. This paper presents an improvement to DRP, called DRPNext, to mitigate exposed nodes impact on system capacity and shows system capacity gain by more than 30% in benefit from reduced channel reuse distance in home environments.