Ultra-wideband technology for short-range wireless communications

The ultra-wideband (UWB) radio core idea is to open large amounts of spectrum to a variety of users with little mutual interference between them. While ultra-wideband is being championed by several commercial companies, this technology has not followed the conventional path where commercial interest is preceded by years of academic research. This work attempts to fill in some of the gap by studying fundamental properties of communications with impulse-based radio UWB signals. We study jam resistance and capacity of UWB. Jam resistance is analyzed for binary pulse position modulation (PPM) with the interference being modeled as correlated Gaussian. Closed-form expressions are provided for the jam resistance of a PPM UWB system utilizing rectangular pulses. Simple approximations are obtained for special cases (narrowband interference). Such analysis is extended to other practical UWB waveforms such as Gaussian and Rayleigh monocycles. It is shown that under some conditions, the UWB jam resistance is superior to that of direct sequence spread spectrum (DS-SS). In the second part of this work, we study the capacity of the single-user UWB communication systems utilizing M-ary PPM and bi-phase as well as on-off keying modulation scheme over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and multipath channels. Starting from the known capacity of M-ary modulated signals, the computation of UWB capacity over the AWGN channel takes into account UWB specific constraints. The constraints are the power spectrum density limitation under Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Part 15 rules and the spreading ratio required to achieve a specified jam resistance level. UWB capacity over AWGN channel is expressed as a function of spreading ratio and communication range. Trade-offs between capacity and range of communications and between capacity and spreading ratio are explored. We extend the study of capacity of UWB communications to the multipath channel using the modified S-V model proposed by the IEEE 802.15.3a task group. The complementary cumulative distribution function (CCDF) of the capacities, subject to the FCC power spectral density (PSD) limitation, are obtained for the all Rake (ARake) and selective Rake (SRake) receivers. In both of the cases, maximum ratio combining is employed. Finally, the capacity of multiple-access UWB communications is studied over the AWGN channel. Under certain assumptions, the multiple-access noise component at the receiver is modeled as Gaussian. An expression for the UWB capacity of the multiple-access channel is developed as a function of number of users.