Interference aware scheduling for Ultra Wideband networks

Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) are used for a wide variety of applications. Earlier WPANs, like Bluetooth, offer data rates only for low rate communication. Nowadays, consumer electronic devices have high demands on communication systems, e.g. for high definition video transmission. Users expect future WPANs to act like wired systems by means of reliability, that is, packet loss and distortion. Multimedia systems are ubiquitous; hence, it can be expected, that future WPANs have to operate in dense network topologies. For that reason new technologies have to be evaluated in terms of interference mitigation and their ability to cooperate with Simultaneously Operating Piconets (SOPs). This paper focuses on Ultra Wideband (UWB) communication according to ECMA-368, calledWiMedia. WiMedia's reservation-based medium access for high throughput and strict QoS requirements is evaluated taking inter-piconet interference into account. Strategies for distributed interference aware scheduling are proposed and examined by simulation to show system capacity for given scenarios.