MAC and Physical Layer Design for Ultra-Wideband Communications

Abstract

Ultra-Wideband has recently gained great interest for high-speed short-range communications (e.g. home networking applications) as well as low-speed long-range communications (e.g. sensor network applications). Two flavors of UWB have recently emerged as strong contenders for the technology. One is based on Impulse Radio techniques extended to direct sequence spread spectrum. The other technique is based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. Both schemes are analyzed in this thesis and modifications are proposed to increase the performance of each system. For both schemes, the issue of simultaneously operating users has been investigated.

Current MAC design for UWB has relied heavily on existing MAC architectures in order to maintain backward compatibility. It remains to be seen if the existing MACs adequately support the UWB PHY (Physical) layer for the applications envisioned for UWB. Thus, in this work we propose a new MAC scheme for an Impulse Radio based UWB PHY, which is based on a CDMA approach using a code-broker in a piconet architecture. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the traditional CSMA scheme as well as the receiver-based code assignment scheme.

A new scheme is proposed to increase the overall performance of the Multiband-OFDM system. Two schemes proposed to increase the performance of the system in the presence of simultaneously operating piconets (namely Half Pulse Repetition Frequency and Time spreading) are studied. The advantages/disadvantages of both of the schemes are discussed.