Mobility support enhancements for the WiMedia UWB MAC protocol

Abstract

The WiMedia Alliance is currently specifying a distributed medium access control (MAC) protocol for ultra wide band (UWB) communications in the wireless-personal-area-network (WPAN) environment. Even though this MAC protocol includes basic mechanisms to provide mobility support, such support can be improved via coordination among devices. In this paper, we propose two enhancements for mobility support in the WiMedia MAC protocol. Our enhancements are based on the beacon period (BP)-merging algorithm of the WiMedia MAC protocol with a new distributed coordination. Two cases of mobile WPANs are studied to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements.