UWB - Ultra Wide Band Radio

Impulse Radio

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The exciting new wireless communication technique called Ultra Wide Band (UWB) or impulse radio is transmission of short pulses without carrier (baseband). The pulses must be short with sharp transitions. A conventional radio is modulating a carrier giving a narrow spectral peak.

Impulse based transmission techniques without carrier will give a wide power density spectrum.

The width of the power density spectrum is typical for these systems. Impulse radio is sometimes defined as radio transmission with spectral lines wider than 500Mhz. Although several applications of UWB is exploring high bandwidth wireless networks, the UWB technique may as well be used for low bandwidth communication.

The ultra wide band of transmission is certainly imposing problems with interference with other carrier-based systems like cell phones or WI-FI networks. Only very low power signal may be emitted basically buried in noise. Correlator based receivers has been developed for recovering weak UWB signals (Rake receivers) making wireless transmission possible.

An interesting property of UWB systems is the potential of very power efficient systems.