UWB (Ultra-WideBand)

Overview

What is Ultra WideBand

In the very near future, there will be an exponential explosion in the amount of data that people will want to carry with them in their personal mobile devices so that the data is constantly accessible and available for sharing. Evidently, this creates a great need for fast and free local wireless connectivity with guaranteed interoperability of different types of devices within the mobile, IT and consumer electronics domains (see Figure 1).

To meet these expanding content sharing requirements, Wimedia Alliance is developing Ultrawideband radio specifications that deal with three major objectives:

1. They aim to provide high data rates up to 1 Gbit/sec.
2. They ensure low power consumption, especially important for battery driven devices.
3. They endeavor to create a global de facto UWB radio standard with guaranteed interoperability.

In Wimedia's vision, Wireless USB, Wireless IP, Bluetooth over UWB, and IEEE1394 over UWB can be operated over a common radio platform (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: WiMedia UWB Platform

UWB Program History

We started UWB research in late 2002 following the FCC regulatory decision and UWB standardisation initiative in the IEEE802.15 Working Group which launched Task Group 3a early 2003. In fall 2003, Nokia joined the Multiband OFDM alliance to support Multiband OFDM UWB technology. In February 2004, Nokia became a promoting member of the Multiband OFDM Alliance when the group's status changed into that of a Special Interest Group (SIG) (Pekka Ranta, Representative).

We took an active role in MBOA's MAC specification development to drive low power consumption modes and our technology expert, Juha Salokannel, was elected into the specification drafting committee. When Wimedia and MBOA merged in March 2005, Nokia became a promoting member of the renewed Wimedia Alliance organization, where we have been active in most of the ongoing working groups.

Program Focus

UWB Program Objectives

Our research work focuses on the development of the Wimedia based High Rate Wireless Personal Area Network with emphasis on mobile device usability.

• Drive UWB standard, spectrum regulation, transceiver architecture design and Nokia internal specifications to obtain the best possible technical solution for Nokia mobile devices
• Demonstrate capabilities of UWB Radio from future applications point of view
• Innovate new UWB enabled solutions and applications for short proximity networks
• Create Nokia's intellectual property portfolio

Research Projects within the Program

The UWB Program includes (or has included) several ongoing research projects:

Medium Access Control (MAC):

Our main activities have been to drive low power consumption modes, i.e. adaptive beaconing periods and hibernation for MAC development in WiMedia. Currently, we focus on IP and BT protocols over Wimedia UWB development and association model selection. In addition, we work on developing simulation models to be able to do performance evaluations and to study potential enhancements in UWB systems.

Physical Layer and Regulatory issues (PHY):

Ultrawideband transmitters may cause significant interference to other systems locating either in-band or out-of-band on UWB operating frequency. To study these negative effects, we have conducted victim receiver measurements for WCDMA and EDGE systems. During 2005, we have been heavily involved in European regulatory process especially focusing on the impact analysis to the victim systems above 6 GHz. This work has resulted in numerous contributions to the CEPT TG3 (listed below).

For the future improvement of WiMedia air-interface, we have carried out advanced coding and high data rate (up to 1 Gbit/s) research for WiMedia UWB. Some of the results are published in two conference papers (listed below).

Wireless Remote Display over Ultrawideband:

We have developed a proof-of-concept demonstrator together with Wiquest, Inc to transfer the display signal of a multimedia terminal over UWB radio to a large external display (e.g., TV or dataprojector.)

Dual band group RFIC for global spectrum regulations

This work was motivated by the expected development that global contiguous UWB spectrum may not exist at frequencies below 5 GHz, therefore, dual band group RFIC covering both bands above 3.1 GHz and 6GHz is necessary to support global UWB use. The project intends to provide proof-of concept design and implementation of Dual band group WiMedia UWB radio on full CMOS RFIC. Dual band group means that Band Groups 1 and 3 (3168-4752 MHz, 6336-7920 MHz) are both possible in the same HW. Currently, the silicon process employed is STM HCMOS9: 0.13 um, 90 GHz/1.2 V.

Fast Data Download (a.k.a. FastCopy)

(project completed in 2004)
FastCopy was a practical concept demonstration project focused on UWB integration in MMC card with direct memory access. This was a joint development project and results were presented at the ICU2005 Conference (IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband (ICU)), Sept 5-8, 2005 in an article by Didier Helal (STMicroelectronics), Harald Kaaja (NRC), et.al. (see Conference Paper #12 below).

Resulting Publications / Papers / Presentations

Conference Papers:

1. Marilynn P. Wylie-Green and Peter Wang, "UWB: Principles, Practices and Potential", APOC 2003 Conference Proceedings, Wuha, China, November 2003.
2. Marilynn P. Wylie-Green, "Impact of Ultrawideband on cdma2000 Forward Link Performance," APOC 2003 Conference Proceedings, Wuha, China, November 2003.
3. Marilynn P. Wylie-Green and Peter Wang, "The Impact of Ultrawideband Emissions on cdma2000 Forward Link Performance", Conference Proceedings of IEEE Radio and Wireless Conference 2004, Atlanta, GA, USA, September 2004, pp. 255-258.
4. Marilynn P. Wylie-Green and Peter Wang, "Effects of Noise-Like UWB Emissions on cdma2000 Forward Link Performance", Conference Proceedings of the IEEE 2005 Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, New Orleans, LA, USA.
5. Marilynn P. Wylie-Green, "Comparison of the Bhattacharyya and Cramer-Rao Lower Bounds for the Position Estimation of an OFDM Transmitter", Proceedings of the IEEE 2005 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, (March 18-23).
6. Marilynn P. Wylie-Green, Pekka A. Ranta and Juha Salokannel, "Multi-band OFDM UltraWideband Solution for IEEE 802.15.3a WPANs", IEEE 2005 Sarnoff Conference Proceedings.
7. Marilynn P. Wylie-Green, "Dynamic Spectrum Sensing by Multiband OFDM Radio for Interference Mitigation", to appear in the Proceedings of the IEEE DYSPAN 2005 Conference.
8. Pekka A. Ranta, "Is UWB interference or provides new interconnectivity", Ultrawideband Europe, March, 2005.
9. Sassan Iraji, Nikolai Nefedov, Heikki Berg, Timo Lunttila and Pekka A. Ranta, "Performance of Zigzag codes in a Multi-Band OFDM Ultra-Wideband System," Softcom 2005 conference, Split, Croatia, 15-17 September 2005.
10. Timo Lunttila, Juha Salokannel, Arto Palin, and Pekka Ranta, "Nopeat laiteyhteydet langattomiksi," Prosessori ES, Marraskuu 2004 (Finnish only).
11. J. Salokannel and J. Reunamäki, "Power Efficient UWB MAC for Mobile Devices," Wireless World Research Forum. 2005.
12. Didier Helal (STMicroelectronics), Harald Kaaja (NRC), et.al, "UWB file transfer between mobile terminals using Multi-Media Card standard interface and Bluetooth as a control radio" IEEE International Conference on Ultra-Wideband (ICU), Sept 5-8, 2005.
13. Wei Cui, Harald Kaaja, "Low Latency Buffer Allocation for Dual Radio Transceivers", Global Mobile Congress Conference Proceedings. GMC2005 10-12 October 2005 Chongqing, China.
14. Timo Lunttila, Sassan Iraji, Heikki Berg, "Advanced Coding Schemes for a Multi-Band OFDM Ultrawideband System towards 1 Gbps", accepted for presentation at CCNC 2006, Las Vegas, US.

Presentations

1. Marilynn P. Green, "Need for High Rate PANs for Mobile Devices," presented to the ITU-R in Boston, Massachussetts on behalf of Wimedia, June 2004.
2. Marilynn P. Green, "Need for High Rate PANS for Mobile Devices," Invited panelist at the CCNC 2005 Speaker’s Panel on "Emerging Markets Based on MBOA UWB Including Development in Wireless USB and Wireless 1394", Las Vegas, Nevada, January 2005.
3. Marilynn P. Green, Chairperson of the Ultrawideband Session for the IEEE 2005 Sarnoff Conference.

Future Possibilities

Developing low power consumption techniques is always critical in battery driven devices. As the UWB will used above 6GHz, development of RFIC technology and techniques to improve link budget will of great importance. Developing adhoc networking capabilities and mesh type of networks can have interesting benefits in the future.

Recommended Links

http://www.wimedia.org

Collaborations

The UWB Program as been partially funded by the Finnish National Technology Development Institution (TEKES). Research co-operation partners included: Centre for Wireless Communication, University of Oulu; PJ Microwave Oy, Elektrobit; and Circuit Design Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology.

Standards

IEEE Contributions

• Marilynn P. Green, IEEE 802.15-04-0563-00-004a, "MAC Requirements for Angle of Arrival Based Ranging", September 2004.
• Marilynn P. Green, IEEE 802.15-05-0482-00-004a "Three-Way Time Transfer Method for Cooperative Ranging", July, 2005.
• Marilynn P. Green, IEEE 802.15-05-0499-00-004a "N-Way Time Transfer Method for Cooperative Ranging", July, 2005.

CEPT ECC TG3

In 2004, the EU gave a mandate to TG3 under CEPT to prepare a recommendation emission mask for Europe. The work is still ongoing and Nokia has made numerous technical contributions which have focused on the merits of driving ultrawideband use in Europe to frequencies above 6 GHz for the protection of incumbent radio services.

• WG3 #17R0, "The Protection Requirements of Fixed Service Systems Below 10.6 GHz From Noise-Like UWB Interference", February 2005.
• TG3#9_22R0, "Fixed Services Compatibility Study (Above 6 GHz)".
• TG3#10_13R1, "UWB Aggregate Scenario for Fixed Services above 6 GHz"
• TG3#11_ 22R2, "FS Aggregate Interference Analysis above 6 Ghz revisited"
• TG3#8_10R1, UWB interference measurement results for UMTS/WCDMA victim systems (Rev.1)
• TG3#9_23R0, Implications of different power levels to UWB use cases