Intelligent signal processing for UWB wireless communication networks

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Ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless transmission collectively refers to a class of radios using signals with an extremely large bandwidth. While UWB has been around since the beginning of all wireless communications at around 1900, it was especially after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's ruling in 2002, which allowed license-free operation of UWB radios, that UWB has been considered as promising physical-layer technology for a manifold of future communication networks. This is because of several features unique to UWB, such as low power and power-spectral density of the transmit signal, high resolution of multipath fading, and low-cost implementation. The huge interest in UWB communication technology is evident from the many major industrial players being involved in the standardization process and the numerous special issues in IEEE journals, as well as IEEE conferences dedicated to UWB. In this project, we will tackle a number of fundamental problems and design challenges that need to be solved before the full potential of UWB can be realized. We will focus on impulse-radio UWB (IR-UWB), which is the original flavor of UWB and the preferred solution for applications with stringent cost, complexity, and energy constraints, as encountered in communication networks for e.g. distributed control, environmental monitoring, tracking, resource management etc. Our research will be directed towards intelligent signal processing algorithms that enable (1) spectrally agile (cognitive) UWB devices for peaceful coexistence with incumbent services, (2) cooperative transmission for efficient communication in UWB networks, (3) high-precision ranging for location-based network applications, and (4) low-complexity modulation and robust detection for UWB transceivers. We have partnered with several industry collaborators in this project, who have a keen interest in exploiting IR-UWB technology to enhance and diversify their products in various markets. The technology transfer to them and other Canadian companies will further be facilitated by testbed and hardware implementation of new signal processing algorithms undertaken within this project.