A Resource Allocation Framework for the Distributed MAC Protocols of Wireless PANs

Both of high-rate and low-rate wireless personal area networks (WPANs), being under development by several standardization bodies, are considering to adopt distributed TDMA MAC protocols in order to provide seamless user mobility for WPAN mesh as well as a good peer-to-peer QoS. It has been, however, pointed out that the absence of a central controller in the wireless TDMA MAC may cause a severe performance degradation: e.g., fair allocation, service differentiation, and admission control may be hard to achieve or can not be provided. In this paper, we suggest a new framework of resource allocation for the distributed MAC protocols in WPANs. Simulation results show that our algorithm achieves both a fair resource allocation and flexible service differentiations in a fully distributed way for mesh WPANs where the devices have high mobility and various requirements. We also provide an analytical modeling to discuss about its unique equilibrium and to compute the lengths of reserved time slots at the stable point.