Abstract

Ultra wideband (UWB) technology based primarily on the impulse radio paradigm has a huge potential for revolutionizing the world of digital communications especially wireless communications. Multiple packets can be assembled into a single frame at the medium access control (MAC) layer, which can significantly improve the throughput performance. This paper presents a detailed performance analysis for UWB multi-band MAC protocol. The MAC protocol is presented as two different clases. The first class involves all bands as data bands, while in the second calss one of its band is used for traffic control. The analysis is based on using multi-server queuing model and a detailed simulation. Each data band is represented as a server in the queuing model. The analysis is complemented with extensive simulations. In the experimental results, the protcol performance is presented as mean packet size, average packet delay, and blocking probability. A number of important conclusions were outlined from this study. First, the increase of transition rate between two classes has noticeable effect on the average number of packets in the queue and in the system, while the increase of the utilization rate U has a remarkable same effect. Next, the absence of one data band effects on the average number of packets decreases as the transmission rate decreases. Finally, the use of a multi-band approach provides an inherent flexibility in operation to coexist with other wireless networks.

Key words: Ultra wideband (UWB), wireless communications, medium access control (MAC), ad hoc networks, multi-server queuing model.