Multimedia traffic management at MAC layer in IEEE 802.15.3a personal area networks

Among several wireless network scenarios, the in-home environment is one of the more challenging in the last years. In particular, the wireless personal area network (WPAN) seems one of the most interesting application scenario, as that networks work in small area for delivering multimedia traffic. The IEEE 802.15.3 is the emerging standard for WPAN. This standard is designed to provide low complexity, low cost and low power-consumption for personal area networks that manage multimedia traffic, video and audio between different devices in a small area environment. The piconet is the basic topology structure of a WPAN and it is defined as group devices, where one of them is the piconet coordinator (PNC). A PNC manages the synchronization and controls the data traffic of the system. This paper proposes an adaptive medium access control (MAC) technique for high data-rate WPANs. The proposed system aims to maximize the performance of the WPAN in terms of throughput, considering multimedia traffic.