A novel design of IEEE 802.15.3 MAC over UWB

In this paper, we introduce a novel design for the medium access control (MAC) layer of IEEE 802.15.3, which is defined for a high-rate WPAN system. We split the 802.15.3 MAC into two layers: upper layer MAC and lower layer MAC, according to the different timing requirements. Thus, our MAC implementation includes two main modules: (1) a 802.15.3 network interface card (NIC) which is responsible for only direct transmission/reception and other timing critical functions such as protocol accelerator; (2) a driver in operating system (OS) which is a flexible plug-in module and allows us to implement some non-timing-critical intelligent algorithms. The proposed approach has many advantages such as scalability, flexibility and low cost for chip vendors.