ECAP. An Enhancement of the IEEE 802.15.3 MAC via Novel Scheduling Scheme

The High Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) is mainly targeted to consumer electronics and portable communication devices which need high rates and QoS. To achieve these goals, the WPAN provides data rates up to 1Gbps and adopts a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) MAC protocol. Since IEEE 802.15.3 MAC is based on TDMA scheme, it has good performance in dealing with real traffiecs. But it does not give better results for dynamic traffic. For dynamic traffic, IEEE 802.15.3 MAC needs a kind of request and response policy that brings about the degradation of performance in order to adapt to network changes. To overcome this problem and enhance the data throughput, this paper proposes a scheduling scheme which uses the Enhanced Contention Access Period (ECAP) to transmit data contentionally during CTAP in PM mode. In PM mode, DEVs can send its data only for the assigned CTAs in wake-superframe. It means that lots of CTAs is not allocated, or empty, in non-wake superframes. The proposed scheme uses these empty CTAs as a CAP with priority. The use of ECAP not only improves QoS, but also boosts the performance of best effort applications.