Scheduling algorithms for multimedia traffic over high-rate WPANs

The IEEE 802.15.3 standard aims at covering the gaps of current Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) technologies in supporting applications with very high-rate and/or quality of service requirements. To this end, the standard encompasses high-rate modulations and a flexible medium access mechanism that permits resource reservation. Whereas the standard defines the general resource management framework, the definition of practical scheduling algorithms is left open to proprietary solutions. In this paper we investigate the potentialities offered by the IEEE 802.15.3 framework for supporting multimedia services. More specifically, we analyze the performance of some classical scheduling policies in presence of intensive real-time and multimedia traffic, in order to identify the most effective strategy for the considered scenarios. The analysis has been performed by using a complete 802.15.3 C++ simulator, where we have realized the different scheduling strategies upon an entirely standard-compliant round robin polling procedure. Results show that the simple and well-known scheduling strategies considered in this study offer very good performance in a large set of realistic application scenarios.