Scheduling and power control for MAC layer design in multihop IR‐UWB networks

Recently, a number of researchers have proposed media access control (MAC) designs for ultra‐wideband (UWB) networks. Among them, designs based on scheduling and power control seem to be of great promise, particularly for quality‐of‐service (QoS) traffic. We investigate the efficiencies of many different choices for scheduling and power allocation for QoS traffic in a multihop impulse radio (IR)‐UWB network, with the objective of achieving both high spectral efficiency and low transmission power. Specifically, we compare different scheduling schemes employing a protocol interference‐based contention graph as well as a physical interference‐based contention graph. We propose a relative distance to determine adjacency in the protocol interference‐based contention graph. Using our improved protocol interference model with graph‐based scheduling, we obtained better performance than the physical interference‐based approach employing link‐by‐link scheduling. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.