Ultra Wide Band Technology

Ultra wideband (UWB), which is an underlay (or sometimes referred as shared unlicensed) system, coexists with other licensed and unlicensed narrowband systems. The transmitted power of UWB devices is controlled by the regulatory agencies [such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States], so that UWB system does not affect narrowband system in a large extend and vice versa. In February 2002, the Federal Communications Commission allocated 7500 MHz of spectrum for unlicensed use of commercial ultra-wideband (UWB) communication devices. This spectral allocation has initiated an extremely productive activity for industry and academia. Wireless communications experts now consider UWB as available spectrum to be utilized with a variety of techniques, and not specifically related to the generation and detection of short RF pulses as in the past. However, UWB offers attractive solutions for many wireless communication areas, including wireless personal area networks (WPANs), wireless telemetry and telemedicine, and wireless sensors networks.

3.1 History of UWB

In 1894, an Italian named Guglielmo Marconi was having his vacation in the Alps when he came across a journal article which caught his attention. Seven years ago, a 31-yearold physics professor Heinrich Hertz demonstrated to his class at the University of Karlsruhe the phenomenon of electromagnetic by generating radio waves. He began working on his versions of spark gap transmitters in his laboratory, sending Morse-coded pulse streams across his laboratory. The breakthrough came on January 23, 1901 where Guglielmo Marconi sent the first over-the-horizon wireless transmission from the Isle of Wight to Cornwall on the British mainland across the Atlantic Ocean. That was the earliest form of impulse radio and soon after, he succeeded in transmission over a distance of 3000km between St. Johns, Newfoundland to Cornwell using digital Morse transmission of the letter S. Research on impulse radio continued and during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Larry Fullerton made use of a technique called time-modulated ultra wideband (TMUWB) to demonstrate the practicality of low power impulse radio techniques. Back to present time. Researchers are still working on transmission of impulses, but rather than building a transmitter using Hertzs and Marconis bulky coils and capacitors, it now consists of tiny integrated circuits and tunnel diodes. Pulses transmitted are no

Ultra Wide Band Technology

longer ragged and erratic like the early impulse transmitters, but instead, precisely timed sequences of specially shaped pulses that lasted only for a few hundred trillionths of a few seconds each. While Marconis transmitter could only send about 10 bits of data per second, ultra wideband technology could send a colossal 100 million bits of digital data in the same amount of time.