A Cooperative MAC Protocol for QoS Enhancement in Wireless USB Networks

Wireless USB (WUSB) is the USB technology merged with WiMedia PHY/MAC based on success of wired USB, and it can be applied to various mobile applications such as laptop, cellular phone, etc. Also, WUSB can provide the better user convenience than wired USB applications as well as be applied to the legacy USB application, since it provides high speed connection between host and devices for the compatibility with USB 2.0 specification and removes the cable among devices using the USB protocol. However the current WUSB protocol can’t prevent the QoS degradation occurred by mobile nodes with low data rate. This problem causes the critical problems in QoS provisioning to isochronous streams and mobile applications. Therefore, we propose a new cooperative MAC protocol for WUSB network with virtual MIMO (multi input multi output) link. Based on instantaneous channel state information among WUSB devices, our proposed protocol can intelligently select the transmission path with higher data rate between WUSB host and WUSB device as well as between WUSB device and WUSB device. Thus our proposed protocol can provide advanced QoS with minimum delay for real-time multimedia services.