Comparison of IEEE 802.11e and IEEE 802.15.3 MAC

IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15.3 target at designing PHY and MAC specifications for wireless local area network (WLAN) and wireless personal area network (WPAN), respectively. They adopt different philosophies for MAC design, namely CSMA/CA in 802.11 and TDMA in 802.15.3. An interesting problem is the performance of each MAC working on the same physical layer, e.g., ultra wideband (UWB). This problem has gained much attention in industry standard meetings recently. In this paper, we compare the performance of two access methods defined in IEEE 802.11e (hybrid coordination function (HCF)) and IEEE 802.15.3 (TDMA) under the same UWB physical layer in terms of the throughput and power management. The results show that the newly added mechanisms of 802.11e, such as transmission opportunity (TXOP) and Block Ack, improve its throughput greatly, making it comparable to that of 802.15.3. In addition, 802.15.3 MAC has easier power management by utilizing its TDMA access method.