Ultra Wide Band Technology

Ultra Wide Band (UWB)  is a revolutionary technology with incomparable potential in terms of throughput, performance and low cost implementation. The uniqueness of UWB is that it transmits across extremely wide bandwidth of several GHz, around a low center frequency, at very low power levels.

UWB is fundamentally different from existing radio frequency technology. For radios today, picture a guy watering his lawn with a garden hose and moving the hose up and down in a smooth vertical motion. You can see a continuous stream of water in an undulating wave. Nearly all radios, cell phones, wireless LANs and so on are like that: a continuous signal that’s overlaid with information by using one of several modulation techniques. Now picture the same guy watering his lawn with a swiveling sprinkler that shoots many, fast, short pulses of water. That’s typically what UWB is like: millions of very short, very fast, precisely timed bursts or pulses of energy, measured in nanoseconds and covering a very wide area. By varying the pulse timing according to a complex code, a pulse can represent either a zero or a one: the basis of digital communications.
UWB is almost two decades old, but is used mainly in limited radar or position-location devices. Only recently has UWB been applied to business communications. It’s a different type of transmission that will lead to low-power, high-bandwidth and relatively simple radios for local- and personal-area network interface cards and access points. At higher power levels in the future, UWB systems could span several miles or more.
Wireless technologies such as 802.11b and short-range Bluetooth radios eventually could be replaced by UWB products that would have a throughput capacity 1,000 times greater than 802.11b (11M bit/sec). Those numbers mean UWB systems have the potential to support many more users, at much higher speeds and lower costs, than current wireless LAN systems. Current UWB devices can transmit data up to 100Mbps, compared to the 1Mbps of Blue-tooth and the 11Mbps of 802.11b. Best of all, it costs a fraction of current technologies such as Blue-tooth, WLANs and Wi-Fi.
ULTRA WIDE BAND
This concept doesn’t stand for a definite standard of wireless communication. This is a method of modulation and data transmission which can entirely change the wireless picture in the near future. The diagram given below demonstrates the basic principle of the UWB:
The UWB is above and the traditional modulation is below which is called here Narrow Band (NB), as opposed to the Ultra Wideband. On the left we can see a signal on the time axis and on the right there is its frequency spectrum, i.e. energy distribution in the frequency band. The most modern standards of data transmission are NB standards – all of them work within a quite narrow frequency band allowing for just small deviations from the base (or carrier) frequency. Below on the right you can see a spectral energy distribution of a typical 802.11b transmitter. It has a very narrow (80 MHz for one channel) dedicated spectral band with the reference frequency of 2.4 GHz. Within this narrow band the transmitter emits a considerable amount of energy necessary for the following reliable reception within the designed range of distance (100 m for the 802.11b). The range is strictly defined by FCC and other regulatory bodies and requires licensing. Data are encoded and transferred using the method of frequency modulation (control of deviation from the base frequency) within the described channel.