Performance Evaluation of ECMA-368 Medium Access Control Protocol for UWB Ad-hoc Networks

Ultra Wideband (UWB) is an emerging technology for high rate, short range wireless communications. Its unique features such as low power operation, robustness to multi-path fading, and accurate positioning capabilities makes UWB a good platform for wireless personal area networks (WPANs). One of the recent UWB standards standardized by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) International is the ECMA368, which defines the physical (PHY) and media access control (MAC) layers for high rate WPANs. The MAC protocol in ECMA-368 has a superframe structure. Each superframe is divided into three different time periods. The beacon period is used for control purposes. The distributed reserved protocol (DRP) period allows devices to reserve bandwidth for data transmission. The PCA (prioritized contention access) period supports contention-based access between different traffic classes. In this thesis, we propose an analytical model to evaluate the performance of the ECMA-368 MAC protocol. We assume that packets follow the Markovian Arrival Process (MAP) and various service times can be modeled by different phase type distributions (PHYs). We apply the Matrix Geometric Method (MGM) technique and model the system as a MAP/PHY/1 queueing system. We derive the probability mass function