Singleband UWB systems : analysis and measurements of coexistence with selected existing radio systems

Abstract

<div lang="en" class="abs"><p class="abs_header">Abstract</p><p>An inevitable trend in wireless communications is the requirement for higher and higher data rates. At the same time, location awareness requires high accuracy for positioning ability. One option fulfilling both of these challenges is the use of an ultra wideband (UWB) physical layer technology due to its extremely large inherent bandwidth. From the two possible solutions to generate UWB signals, this thesis is focused on the singleband approach. This technique is closer to the original idea of impulse radio transmission than the other recently proposed multiband UWB approach. </p><p>This thesis focuses on UWB coexistence with several selected radio systems; global positioning and cellular systems, and wireless local area networks. The topic was studied analytically and with experimental tests. The analytical part is divided into simulations and theoretical calculations. In the study, two different physical layer concepts, several modulation schemes and pulse waveforms have been used to find the best system performance under interference. From time hopping and direct sequence based approaches (TH and DS, respectively), the latter with binary pulse amplitude modulation was seen to outperform the former one in an interfered multipath channel if compared with bit error rate performance. Therefore, the theoretical calculations are addressed to the DS-UWB approach. The formulation defined makes it possible to rather easily calculate the upper bound for DS-UWB system performance in an AWGN channel and the results can be used to calculate reference bounds, for example, in receiver algorithm studies. </p><p>The experimental part of the work focused on link level coexistence measurements between UWB and either IEEE802.11b or 3G networks. UWB can cause harmful performance degradation on the victim system if there are unrealistic numbers of active interferers in close vicinity of the victim receiver. However, increasing the separation between the UWB interferer and victim to 40 cm, or 70 cm, in the case of WLAN and 3G, respectively, the impact is insignificant. It was also shown that the activity factor of the UWB transmitter has a great impact on the victim system’s performance degradation. UWB activity factors of less than about 5% can be tolerated by the studied victim systems.</p></div>