A spread-spectrum MAC protocol for impulse-radio networks

Current Medium Access Control (MAC) layer de- sign for Ultra-Wideband (UWB) communication relies heavily on existing MAC protocols and architectures in order to maintain backward compatibility. However, it remains to be seen if the existing MAC protocols adequately support the UWB Physical layer (PHY) in the applications envisioned for UWB systems. In this work, we propose a new MAC-layer protocol that is suitable for an Impulse-Radio (IR) UWB physical layer, which is based on a clustered code-assignment approach. Specifically, the proposed scheme is based on Time-Hopped CDMA (TH-CDMA) where a "code-broker" assigns spreading codes to users that communicate within a cluster or "piconet". The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the CSMA and Receiver- based Code Assignment (RCA) schemes in different scenarios. It is demonstrated that spread-spectrum schemes outperform the CSMA protocol in terms of throughput and latency.

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