Effective packet scheduling with fairness adaptation in ultra-wideband wireless networks

Ultra-wideband (UWB) transmission is an emerging wireless technology, and medium access control (MAC) with quality of service (QoS) provisioning is essential to coordinate the access among competing devices in UWB-based wireless networks. In this paper, we study the exclusive region concept (which was previously proposed) to determine the active set of senders at a time. We find out that, different from the previous work, the exclusive region for a specific link should be a system-level- concept, and should depend on system factors such as interference from/to other active links. Based on the findings, two MAC packet scheduling schemes are proposed to exploit the system capacity and, at the same time, to achieve a certain level of fairness in UWB wireless networks. As the long acquisition time in UWB transmission can significantly reduce the system efficiency, the proposed schemes can be modified to alleviate the negative effect of a long acquisition time. Computer simulations demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed schemes.