Efficient scheduling techniques for high data-rate wireless personal area networks

Among several wireless network scenarios, the in-home environment is one of the more challenging in recent years. In particular, the Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) seems one of the most interesting application scenario as that networks work in small area for delivering multimedia traffic. The IEEE 802.15.3 is the emerging standard for WPAN. This standard is designed to provide low complexity, low cost and low power-consumption for personal area networks that manage multimedia traffic, video and audio between different devices in a small area environment. The piconet is the basic topology structure of a WPAN and it is defined as group devices where one of them is the PicoNet Coordinator (PNC).A PNC manages the synchronisation and controls the data traffic of the system. This paper proposes some scheduling techniques to be used at the MediumAccess Control (MAC) layer for high data-rate WPANs. The proposed scenario is composed of several nodes generating both data and video traffic respecting the application scenario often foreseen for high-rate WPANs. Two scheduling methods are proposed which, exploiting the traffic growth, can improve the performance of the network in terms of throughput and delay. In particular the performance of an adaptive technique and an optimum technique are compared with the performance of the fixed technique considered in the standard.