IEEE 802.15.3a Wireless Personal Area Networks - The MBOA Approach

A new generation of Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) aims at high data rates of several hundred Mb/s. Based on Ultrawideband (UWB) technology theses WPANs make use of a decision of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which decided to allow low power emissions in the spectrum from 3 to 10GHz. Among direct sequence spread spectrum proposals the IEEE 802.15.3a Task Group (TG) received an OFDM based proposal from the Multi Band OFDM Alliance (MBOA). Unlike competing technologies, the MBOA approach provides both, a new Physical Layer (PHY) proposal and a new, decentralized Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol, which differs from the legacy IEEE 802.15.3 MAC. In this paper we give technical description of the new MBOA MAC and PHY layer and provide insight to their performance by means of simulation.