Development of ad hoc and wireless sensor networks using ultra wide band (UWB) radio technology

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Various surveys show that Canadian consumers and businesses have a strong interest in adopting new wireless products to improve their standard of living and increase their productivity. The evolution of wireless access towards data-oriented connections, has led to the coexistence of multiple-access technologies providing new products and services, and exhibiting improved system characteristics (lower power consumption and higher data rates). Over the last seven years, novel architectures like ad hoc and wireless sensor networks have generated new challenges regarding the way radio communication infrastructures must be addressed. Unlike traditional approaches, these architectures require complete self-organization of their nodes as well as support for mobility. The main objective of the proposed research project is to develop efficient and cooperative ad hoc and wireless sensor networks (WSN) based on ultra-wideband (UWB) radio technology to meet the requirements of this new market. The first goal of the research program is to apply UWB with innovative front-end solutions to enhance the system performances in different applications. The second goal is to deploy cooperative algorithms applied to WSN in order to find high efficiency solutions with low complexity implementations for these applications. To achieve these research objectives, the project will be divided into two different directions, which will be investigated in parallel. First, ad hoc UWB wireless sensors will be designed for cooperative localization/tracking in two different indoor environments (in-building and mining). Second, UWB radar sensors will be designed for vehicule collision avoidance applications such as mobile robots and outdoor ground vehicles. The originality of this hardware and algorithmic project consists in combining ad hoc network with wireless sensor devices using a low complexity UWB transceiver front-end in conjunction with novel cooperative algorithms to give application flexibilities, low-cost products and high performance results. Consequently, improved system performance and network cost represent the advantages of the proposed approach compared to the existing ones.