Ultra-Wideband Communications: Interference Challenges and Solutions

TL;DR

This paper examines interference issues in ultra-wideband (UWB) communications, analyzing real-world interference conditions and proposing solutions like interference suppression and bandwidth expansion to improve UWB performance.

Contribution

It provides a practical spectrum survey of UWB interference in current wireless environments and demonstrates the effectiveness of filter bank-based signaling methods.

Findings

Interference suppression can reduce outage probability by over tenfold.

Bandwidth expansion is necessary for non-line-of-sight UWB channels.

Filter bank-based signaling fulfills interference mitigation and bandwidth requirements.

Abstract

The idea of ultra-wideband (UWB) communications for short ranges (up to a few tens of meters) has been around for nearly three decades. However, despite significant efforts by the industry, UWB deployment has not yet reached its predicted potential. This article, thus, seeks to rectify this situation by providing a practical examination of UWB interference conditions. Through a spectrum survey of today's wireless environments, we explore the interference that UWB devices may face from a perspective of outage probability in both high- and low-rate configurations. We find that by suppressing interference, the outage probability can be reduced by one or more orders of magnitude. In the non-line-of sight channels, in particular, we find that both interference suppression and bandwidth expansion are required to support the minimum data rates suggested in the IEEE802.15.4 series of standards. We connect these findings to a recently proposed UWB signaling method based on filter banks and show this method fulfills the above requirements for implementing effective UWB systems.