1

This paper
deals with the most
recent trend and
and successful
technology to transmit data at a very high
Ultra Abstract:
Wide Band
Technology:
Advantages
Challenges

data rate and that too at very low power transmission levels. UWB abbreviated for Ultra Wide Band provide
Kedar Trivedi
numerous advantages over existing wireless technologies but along with the benefits complexity also increases.
13MECC23
This paper discusses the history
of UWB its advantages and its limitations. It also focuses on the solutions found
Institute
of
Technology,
Nirma University
for overcoming the limitations.
Ahmedabad-382481, Gujarat, India
Mob-+91-9924122428,
Email-kedar_91@yahoo.co.in
Keywords:
UWB, EUWB,

I.

INTRODUCTION

Seeing the recent trends wireless technology has become an

integral part of ones life. Most of the communication and data
transfer takes place wirelessly. Variety of technologies keeps
on evolving to make the wireless transmissions at a high data
and provide reliable service along with security. UWB is a
technology that provides very high data rate transmission.
UWB comprise of 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz of frequency band.
The use of this frequency dates 100 years back when Marconi
for the first time did impulse transmission wirelessly. This
technology is based on pulse transmission wherein the width
of the pulse is extremely low. The actual use of UWB stared in
late 1960s for military applications. In early 2000, the
technology started shifting from military use to commercial
use.
According to Federal Communication Commission, UWB is
defined as any transmission scheme with percentage
bandwidth greater than 20% is termed as UWB. It can provide
data rate of 1Gbps for very short distance and provide
minimum of 150Mbps over a considerable distance. The
transmission power levels are way below the noise floor levels
decided for CDMA mobile technology. FCC in USA has
declared the UWB band as unlicensed band provided the
signal levels parameters are maintained below satisfactory
level. This has led to the popularity of UWB as no licensing is
required for its use.
II.

UWB TRANSMISSION AND RECEPTION

To achieve wide bandwidth in frequency domain it is

necessary to have an impulse like transmission in time
domain. To have an exact impulse is not possible practically
so pulses of very short width of the order of 200-500ps are
used. The voltage levels are as low as 500mV. Shape of the
pulse play an important role in UWB transmission system.
Moreover UWB is base band technology and so pulse shaping
is essential so that detection at receiver end becomes easy.
Since UWB technology is designed for low power
applications it is essential that the pulses have low duty cycle.
The duty cycle is kept varying depending upon the channel

and interference levels the duty cycle is decided. The pulses

used for UWB are called mono pulses.
The mono pulses are further classified into mainly three types
namely, Gaussian monopulse, Scholtz mono cycle, and RZ
Manchester.

Fig. 1 Monopulses[5]

As the order of Gaussian pulses increase the number of zero

crossing also increase. The main modulation schemes used are
pulse position modulation (PPM), pulse width modulation
(PWM), On-Off Keying (OOK), and Bi-Phase Modulation
(BPSK).

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Fig. 2 PPM[5]

Fig. 3 PWM[5]

Figure 2,3 and 4 shows the modulation schemes. The

performance of each modulation scheme is different and
unique in different environment. For AWGN channels the
performance of PPM modulation scheme is much better than
PWM while for multi path channel PWM provides good
performance in terms of BER in comparison to PPM. BFSK
also provides better performance in multipath channel in
comparison to PPM and PWM. Recently, MIMO based
OFDM modulation scheme is used for getting much better
performance. Also, a hybrid version of PPM and BPSK is used
for better performance. At receiver end rake receivers are used
for coherent detection of signal. Since the signal level is very
low large number of rake fingers are required to combine the
numerous multi paths and get the desired signal. The design of
rake receiver is a challenging task. Since UWB is also widely
used in wireless sensor networks it becomes extremely
essential to limit the usage of power. So non-coherent
detection is more widely used wherein a reference signal is
sent first and on the basis of received reference signal the
channel characteristics are estimated and then the original
signal is sent and received accordingly.

Fig. 4 BPSK[5]

III.

CHALLENGES

There are numerous challenges in implementation of UWB.

One of the major challenges is the interference of UWB
system with the existing system working in the same
frequency band. The interference can lead to degradation in
the existing 802.11a technology which is working at 5GHz
frequency. It can also interfere with the GPS system working
in this frequency band. So, FCC has put restriction on the
power levels of UWB so that interference can be reduced. On
the other hand, design of hardware that can detect such low
level signals is very challenging. Also, the hardware of UWB
receivers should be such that it rejects the high power signals
coming from existing systems. Figure 5 shows the hard limit
placed by FCC on UWB system use. From it is clear that for
2-3GHz of band power level limit is about -75dBm. This is
kept low as GPS system works in this region and also many
military applications utilize this band. So to avoid interference
the levels are kept very low. Another challenge is in the design
of CMOS circuits. As the pulse width decreases, all signal
processing and signal generating circuits must be capable
enough to respond to this short pulses. So from design point of
view it is difficult to develop UWB system. Another challenge
is to design a notch filter that can stop the interference of
existing system on to the UWB system. For example 802.11a
works with a hard limit of 16dBm while for UWB it is
-41dBm. Since 802.11a is narrow band it occupies 100 kHz
bandwidth with centre frequency of 5GHz. So, this lead to
inter symbol interference and to combat ISI data rate need to
be reduced and if data rate is reduced then the purpose of
UWB is not fulfilled. Another challenge is to design an omni
directional antenna with such large fractional bandwidth.
Since UWB is designed for remote devices the antennas
cannot be very large and so required gain and cannot be
provided. So microstrip antennas are used. But fractional

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bandwidth of microstrip antenna is very low. So designing a
special microstrip antenna is difficult. The amplifiers used in
trans-receivers should be extremely low noise as the power
level of signal is way below the normal allowable noise floor
level. This is again a challenging task. Moreover the
sensitivity of the receiver should be extremely low. As the data
rate is high the ADC and DAC must also work at Msample/s
of rate and also provide high resolution. As the number of bits
are increased in linear fashion the complexity of the increases
exponentially.

Fig. 6 UWB Trans-Receiver system

Fig. 5 Hard Limit for UWB[1]

Figure 6 shows the entire trans-receiver system for UWB.

Another challenge is to provide the same data rate as the
distance between transmitter and receiver increases. Since the
penetration index of high frequency EM waves is very less it
cannot pass through walls of the room and windows. So, inhouse communication is only possible. For long range
communication multiple UWB boosters need to be used and
so a hopping network can be established. Another challenge in
UWB is to design variable bit rate system. As there is trade-off
between data rate and distance it is essential to have variable
bit rate system so that the communication link does not break
all of a sudden if the receiver moves away. So a graceful
degradation should be provided.

Figure 7 shows the graph of throughput versus the distance. It

is clear from the graph that for wideband system throughput
drastically reduces as distance increase while same iis not the
case for narrow band systems.

Fig. 7 Throughput v/s Distance[1]

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IV.

SOLUTION TO UWB CHALLENGES

To mitigate the drawbacks of UWB variety of solutions have

been proposed. The solution not only lies in proper designing
of hardware but an efficient software platform is essential for
this purpose. The open software platform specially designed
for UWB applications is known as EUWB. It is abbreviated
for co-Existing short range radio by advanced Ultra Wide
Band radio technology. For any fruitful communication along
with the data some additional information is also shared like
training bits, frame length information, synchronization bits,
power level indication etc. These signaling bits are not
required to be sent at all time. So a low data rate transmission
(LDR) for such signaling bits is sufficient. But at the same
time high data rate (HDR) is required for actual data
transmission. Now, as the data rate increases the need for
power also increase. Now keeping the power consumption as
low as possible is the prime requirement of the system. So an
open technology platform EUWB was designed. In this two
different protocol stacks are used one for high data rate and
other for low data rate. The physical layer is also different for
both transmissions. Figure 8 shows the software block of
UWB

frequency, transmission parameters, output power levels

according to the channel condition. Cognitive radio adapts to
the channel by making changes in the network and physical
layer. This can help in changing the operating frequency
dynamically so as to reduce the interference of narrow band
signals.
CONCLUSION
Thus UWB technology is of great importance in todays
world. Just by merging cognitive radio and UWB most of the
problems and drawbacks of UWB can be overcome.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I thank god for filling me with positivity. I thank my Sad Guru
Bhagwan Pujya Morari Bapu and my parents for bestowing
me with their blessings.

REFERENCES
[1] Sumit Roy, Jeff R. Foerster, V. Srinivasa
Somayazulu, and Dave G. Leeper, Ultrawideband
Radio Design: The Promise of High-Speed, Short-Range
Wireless Connectivity,Proceedings of IEEE, Vol 2, 2004.
[2] Michael Sablatash, Mitigation of Interference by Ultra
Wide Band Radio into Other Communication Services:
Evolution to Cognitive Ultra Wide Band Radio, IEEE
Conference Publication 2006.
[3] Fabrizio Granelli, Honggang Zhang, Cognitive Ultra Wide
Band Radio: A Research Vision and Its Open Challenges,

Fig. 8 Physical Layer splitting[6]

From above figure it is clear the even the MAC layer for lower
data rate is different to that of high data rate MAC. Error
detection and correction blocks are added for HDR MAC as
huge chunk of data is transmitted while for LDR on error
detection is used in LDR MAC. The important issue is to
properly synchronize and add signaling bits at regular interval
in the data frame. So combiner must be efficient. This
technique helps in improving the performance of the system.
Now talking about the physical layer then differential BPSK
modulation technique is used for signaling bits while for HDR
OFDM based hybrid modulation scheme is used.
Another method is to decompose the signal in various subbands so that interference due to existing systems can be
reduced. The best way to mitigate interference is by the
combination of UWB and cognitive radio. Cognitive radio can
sense the environment and can make required changes
according to real time conditions. It helps in modifying the

IEEE, 2005.
[4] David D. Wentzloff, Ral Blzquez, Fred S. Lee, Brian P.
Ginsburg, Johnna Powell, and Anantha P. Chandrakasan
System Design Considerations for Ultra-Wideband
Communication, IEEE Communications Magazine, 2005.
[5] Ashish K. Thakre, Amol I. Dhenge Selection
of pulse for ultra wide band communication
(UWB) system, IJARCCE, 2012.
[6] Peter Jung, Dong Xu, Andreas Waadt, Alexander
Viessmann, The EUWB Open Technology Platforms for
Ultra Wide Band Communications, IEEE,2011