Performance of ultra wide band systems in high speed wireless personal area networks

Abstract

In this work, the performance of ultra wideband (UWB) systems in high-speed wireless personal area networks (WPAN) is studied. UWB enjoys many advantages over other wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and WiMax, most notably high spectral efficiency, high data rate, low power consumption, and more robustness and adaptability. Focusing on the physical layer of WPAN, multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) driven by high speed 480 Mbps-dual carrier modulation (DCM)is implemented for four types of UWB multipath channels (CM1, CM2, CM3, CM4), termed Mode 1, based on the IEEE 802.15.3a model. Analytical expressions for mean bit error rates are then provided for various modulation schemes. The receiver structure is based on a generalized innovation-matched filter (GIMF) to account for the colour spectral characteristic of the additive multi-user interference. The GIMF detector is proven to outperform the classical matched filter for Mode 1 channels because of its ability to capture the stochastic characteristics of UWB channels and robustly adapt to their spectral density shapes. CM1 channel is shown to enjoy the highest performance due to the presence of a strong LOS, while the worst performance is attributed to CM4 channel because it is highly frequency selective and is subject to a large degree of noise severity. For signal-to-noise ratio margins below 0 dB, CM3 and CM4 channels are shown to have nearly identical performances.