Enhancement of IEEE 802.15.3 high rate WPAN via MAC header compression

Abstract

The IEEE 802.15.3 efficiently uses time-division multiple-access (TDMA) to support the quality of service (QoS) for multimedia traffic. In the TDMA mechanism, however, there is a significant difference between 802.15.3 and other TDMA standards. Unlike GSM and HiperLAN-type2, 802.15.3 can transmit multiple frames continuously within a time-slot, thus most of the header fields in subsequent frames are duplicated. To reduce the frame header overhead, the MAC frame header is compressed by eliminating unchangeable fields. The algorithm of header compression is based on the existing IP header compression scheme. We evaluate performance of the proposed header compression method in terms of header overhead using simple numerical analysis.