AbstractsEngineering

Broadband Internet access technologies and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) have enabled service providers to deliver high-definition video streams to the doorsteps of IPTV subscribers. On the other hand, how to distribute the high data rate, delay sensitive video traffic to almost all rooms in a typical household environment becomes a new challenge. There are several approaches proposed for IPTV in-home distribution, among which the wireless ones are very attractive due to their flexibility and affordability, but the physical and media access control (MAC) layer limitations in most existing wireless technologies still impend the success of video streaming over wireless networks. Recently, WiMedia Alliance has finalized its MB-OFDM based Ultra Wide Band (UWB) standards for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN). WiMedia UWB supports two MAC protocols: Distributed Reservation Protocol (DRP) and Prioritized Channel Access (PCA), which are very suitable for high-quality video streaming. Based on our experimentation experience, the focus of our work is to develop an analytical model for WiMedia UWB MAC protocols using the renewal reward theorem framework and quantify the video streaming performance considering all practical features (PCA, Hard DRP, Soft DRP, TXOP) of WiMedia MAC protocols. We have done extensive simulation in \textit{NS-2} to validate the model and further evaluate the performance of WiMedia UWB MAC protocols.