Distributed multi-hop reservation scheme for wireless personal area ultra-wideband networks

Abstract

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is a promising technology for multimedia applications in wireless personal area networks (WPANs) that supports very high data rates with lower power transmission for short range communication. The limitation of coverage radius of UWB network necessitates for multihop transmissions. Unfortunately, as the number of hops increases, the quality of service (QoS) degrades rapidly in multihop network. The main goal of this research is to develop and enhance multihop transmission that ensures QoS of real time traffic through the proposed distributed multihop reservation (DMR) scheme. The DMR scheme consists of two modules; distributed multihop reservation protocol (DMRP) and path selection. DMRP incorporates resource reservation, routing and connection setup that are extended on the existing WiMedia Media Access Control protocol (MAC). On the other hand, the path selection determines the optimal path that makes up the multihop route. The path selection selects nodes based on the highest Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR). The performance of DMR scheme has been verified based on the performance of the video traffic transmission. The main metrics of QoS are measured in terms of Peak Signal- to- Noise ratio (PSNR), End-to-End (E2E) delay, and throughput. The results show that DMRP compared to Multiple Resources Reservation Scheme (MRRS) in six (6) hops transmission has enhanced the average PSNR by 16.5%, reduced the average E2E delay by 14.9% and has increased the throughput by 11.1%. The DMR scheme which is the inclusion of path selection in DMRP has been compared to Link Quality Multihop Relay (LQMR). DMR scheme has improved the video quality transmission by 17.5%, reduced the average E2E delay by 18.6% and enhanced the average throughput by 20.3%. The QoS of six (6) hops transmission employing DMR scheme is almost sustained compared to two hops transmission with the QoS experiencing only slight degradation of about 2.0%. This is a considerable achievement as it is well known that as the number of hops increases the QoS in multihop transmission degrades very rapidly. Thus DMR scheme has shown to significantly improve the performance of real time traffic on UWB multihop network. In general, DMR can be applied to any WPAN network that exploit multihop transmission.