A Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm for Supporting Real-time Applications in 802.15.3 WPANs

The 802.15.3 Task Group was formed to create a standard that would enable wireless connectivity of high-speed, multi-media capable portable consumer devices within a Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN). In particular, the 802.15.3 standard defines a piconet as a wireless ad hoc data com-munications system, confined to a small area. A piconet is made by a single piconet coordinator (PNC) and one or more devices associated to it. The PNC has to allocate the channel bandwidth to DEVs in order to fulfil QoS constraints,but 802.15.3 standard does not specify how this allocation should be done. Exploiting a control theoretic approach, this paper proposes a bandwidth allocation algorithm for providing bounded delay services in a 802.15.3 piconet. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been analyzed both theoretically and using ns-2 computer simulations, in realistic scenarios where video, voice, and FTP flows, coexist at various network loads. Theoretical results show how to tune the dynamic bandwidth allocation algorithm. Simulation results confirm that our scheduler is able to provide services with real-time constraints in a broad range of trafficloads.