Chapter 35 - High-rate WPAN

Summary

Introduction

With the adoption of the 3.1-10.6 GHz band by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for commercial wireless communication, Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) has attracted both scientific and commercial interest and is now emerging as a promising technology for high-speed (several hundred Mbps and beyond)) short-range wireless communications for home and office networking applications. Sometimes also referred to as impulse radio, UWB communication systems operate across a wide range of spectrum relative to the center frequency. The radiated energy, occupying a large bandwidth (typically measured in GHz), is often made sufficiently small that it can facilitate co-existence with other devices without causing significant harmful interference to them. Advantages of current UWB implementations include low-cost, low-power, and resilience to multi-path interference.

Driven largely by UWB technology, high-rate short-range Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) are expected to find wide use in the coming several years. Companies are already announcing chipset solutions complying with some of the industrial de-facto standards. A band hopping OFDM based Physical (PHY) layer, has gained wide industry support as a standard for high-rate WPANs. This proposal was initially developed by Multi-Band OFDM Alliance (MBOA) and presented as a candidate for 802.15.3a WPAN PHY layer. It was later adopted and was further developed by WiMedia Alliance. The version 1.0 of the WiMedia PHY specification together with a newly developed ad-hoc distributed MAC specification has been standardized by Ecma as a high-rate WPAN standard.