Cross-layer optimization in ultra wideband networks

Ultra wideband (UWB) network brings both chance and challenge to personal area wireless communications. Compared with other IEEE 802 small range wireless protocols (such as WLAN and Bluetooth), UWB has both extremely high bandwidth (up to 480 Mbps) and low radiation. Moreover, the structured MAC layer of UWB is the fundamental difference to WLAN. The top one is that only when two UWB devices belong to the same piconet can they communicate with each other directly, which means that we must jointly consider topology formation and routing when deploying UWB networks because the interaction between routing and topology formation makes separate optimization ineffective. This paper tries to optimize UWB network from a cross-layer point of view. Specifically, given device spatial distribution and traffic requirement, we want to form piconets and determine routing jointly, to maximize the overall throughput. We formulate the problem of joint optimization to mixed-integer programming and give a practical lower bound that is very close to the theoretical upper bound in our simulation. Furthermore, our lower bound is much better than an algorithm that only considers topology formation in UWB networks.