Low Power Software Defined Ultra Wideband Transceiver Implementation

Ultra Wideband (UWB) has the potential to offer capacity much higher than the current narrowband systems for short range applications. The basic approach used by Ultra Wideband (UWB) communication systems is based on sharing spectrum already occupied by other wireless services, instead of identifying available new bands. The advantage of Software Defined Radios (SDR) is that it offers programmability and reconfigurability which helps us to implement various communication standards and modulation schemes. This paper describes the implementation of a Software Defined Radio Transceiver for a Ultra Wideband like low power signal including the timing synchronization between transmitter and receiver. We describe briefly the Wireless open Access Research Platform (WARP) and programming environment. According to the Specifications of this platform a downscaled version of a UWB like signal is considered. The main focus is on the implementation of Time Hopping Pulse Position Modulated Ultra Wideband scheme (TH-PPM UWB). In the receiver part first a sliding window correlator receiver is implemented where preamble based timing synchronization is achieved, followed by matched filter based data detection scheme. BER performance is measured for wired and wireless channels.