Research & Simulation Of The MAC Protocol Of UWB Network

The UWB (Ultra Wide Band) technology uses nanosecond to picosecond level non-sine wave narrow pulses to transmite data without the carrier. The bandwidth which these pulses occupy can reach GHz level, the maximum data rate can reach 100 Mbit/s level. In high speed communications however, the transmit power of UWB devices is very small. Since the UWB technology can realize high speed data communication with low power in the same time; it is regarded as one of the key techonologies of the next generation wireless communication.ECMA-368 is the standardization of UWB technology. This protocol describes the technical details of the MAC (Media Access Control) layer which based on distributed architecture. As a distributed protocol, the MAC policies specified in ECMA standard are desirable for high rate and zero - infrastructure communications among WPAN devices.This paper mainly discussed the MAC protocol of the UWB system, especially the media access methods which based on reserved distributed channel access mechanism and based on competitive points priority channel access mechanism. First, this paper discussed the basic working principles of the MAC layer of the ECMA– 368 protocol, including time management, beacon mechanism and data transmission mechanism, etc. Then discussed the working principles of two data transmission protocols: Distributed Reservation Protocol and Prioritized Contention Access Protocol, and emulated the two protocols using the OPNET software. Then, this paper proposed a FPGA realizing plan of the two protocols and used the ModelSim tool to simulate them. In the last part, this paper put forward several shortages of the ECMA– 368 protocol and works which need to finish in the future. Also, pointed out the key technologies required in order to complete realize ECMA - 368 MAC layer protocol.