TR2007-070

A Non-Coherent 802.15.4a UWB Impulse Radio
Citation: Duan, C.; Orlik, P.; Sahinoglu, Z.; Molisch, A.F., "A Non-Coherent 802.15.4a UWB Impulse Radio", IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband (ICUWB), ISBN: 978-1-4244-0521-3, pp. 146-151, September 2007 (IEEE Xplore)
Date:September 2007
MERL Contacts:Chunjie Duan, Andreas F. Molisch, Philip Orlik, Zafer Sahinoglu

The new IEEE 802.15.4a standard for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) extends the capabilities of its popular predecessor IEEE 802.15.4, and enables accurate range/distance estimation between communicating devices. In addition to its ranging capabilities, the new standard also defines several new data rates ranging from 100 kb/s to 27Mb/s and a variety of options that give IEEE 802.15.4a compliant devices a high degree of flexibility and scalability. In this article we describe our implementation of an UWB impulse radio device, which is compliant with the 802.15.4a standard. Our implementation uses non-coherent energy-detection based receivers both to demodulate data and to detect ranges. We will present our prototype system and discuss some implementation details (energy detection, sampling rates, acquisition/synchronization) specific to non-coherent receivers. The performance of our prototype system is discussed as well. The reported range estimation error is less than 30cm, which agrees well with theoretical predictions.

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