In this work, we focus on physical and medium access control layer modeling and simulation for short range wireless communication. In particular, the modeling of the Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band technique for wireless sensor networks and the high data rate communication modeling which uses millimeter wave and beamforming. The first part deals with the modeling of Impulse Radio Ultra Wide Band. The proposed model takes into account the pulse collision induced by multiple concurrent transmissions at the physical layer which is also called multi user interference. This aspect is accurately introduced thanks to the concept of reception time hopping sequences of concurrent reception and their orthogonality. The simulation architecture is built using two models: the first model is based on a uniformly distributed pulse train and the second model, more complete, takes into account variable time hopping sequences. The performance evaluation of this part is based on a typical wireless sensor networks application, in which sensor nodes are scattered on a particular area to detect and report intrusion events to a base station. The second part deals with the modeling of high data rate communication using millimeter wave. The targeted goal of millimeter wave transmission is to increase the data rate using some novel techniques: beamforming and data aggregation. Beamforming is modeled on the so-called codebook beamforming defined as the new beamforming technique for high data rate wireless communication standards. A methodology is developed to take into account the radiation pattern defined by the codebook indexes. For each index the gain of the directional antenna is computed for each direction. This is used in the simulation model physical layer to determine the directional antenna gain in a particular direction during the propagation stage. The defined protocols for sector level and beam level training defined in the 802.15.3c draft are also modeled. The performance evalu ation of this part is based on a multimedia distribution system.