New Medium Idle Time Via Industry Protocol Type

WiMedia UWB platform consists of two specifications; WiMedia MAC and PHY. WiMedia MAC may give support to allow industry protocol applications to share UWB resource. Actually, in addition to certified wireless USB, wireless 1394 and TCP/IP, many other industry protocols can reside on top of the WiMedia UWB platform. Thus the mechanism to decide medium access time between them is very important to support QoS. However current WiMedia MAC only defines differentiated medium access idle time via Access Categories (ACs) for traffic data type. The medium access idle time by the ACs may not guarantee QoS for multiple industry protocol applications. For example, if two industry protocols, wireless USB and wireless 1394, use the same AC by same traffic data type, the protocols may easily have contention collision due to same idle time through same AC, because ACs decide medium idle time. Within WiMedia MAC specification, all application devices shall wait for specific idle time called Arbitration Interframe Space (AIFS), which is defined by ACs and PCA parameters, before accessing the shared medium. After AIFS duration, devices can transmit data on the shared medium. Since same AC has the same AIFS Duration, in the multiple industry protocol environments, an idle time via the ACs may be very inadequate for a medium access QoS. In this paper, we concentrate on defining an industry protocol-based AIFS parameter for a new medium access method. The values of industry protocol-based AIFS parameters are determined by priority of industry protocol applications. End user can set the priority of an industry protocol for its own use case.