Making the UWB PHY a "Transparent Patient"

by Johannes Stahl, CoWare Inc. – June 30, 2004

The debate about the relative merits of Multiband OFDM and Direct Sequence UWB (DS-UWB) continues unabated. The proponents of each approach praise its particular merits, leaving designers to perform comparative analyses based upon their own definitions of operational requirements. The IEEE has taken the responsibility to bring order into this chaos, but how does it—and the industry as a whole—make a sensible standards decision without solid comparison data?

Just as medical researchers are doing with the human body, we must look inside the UWB physical layer (PHY) to analyze its operation and identify improvements. The large number of measurements and data required to do so effectively precludes the use of hardware prototypes, which are time consuming and expensive. Computer simulation using fully transparent models of the various approaches is the only methodology that can perform the requisite relative performance analysis in a reproducible, timely and cost-effective fashion.

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