Performance Evaluation of Multihop WPANs Based on a Realistic OFDM UWB Physical Layer

Multiband-OFDM (MB-OFDM) is one of the promising candidates for UWB-based alternative PHY layer for WPAN. However, the coverage radius of MB-OFDM UWB system is very short, and single-hop transmission may not be adequate for very high-data-rate WPAN. Therefore, multi-hop ad hoc WPAN is considered to extend the UWB radio coverage. Since IEEE 802.15.3 MAC layer is designed for peer-to-peer communication, the following question arises: can the quality-of-service parameters still be preserved in multi-hop scenarios? In our study, thorough investigations using simulation are conducted by avoiding as many assumptions as possible, and the performances are evaluated to answer this question. It can be observed that 802.15.3 TDMA MAC layer functions well in the context of multihop network with on-demand rate-based scheduling scheme and the proper routing protocol. Multihop WPAN based on OFDM UWB physical layer could be a viable approach to extend the network coverage for very high data rate multimedia traffic