A study of UTD diffraction for UWB channel modelling

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) is an emergent technology which will be about to provide, in a near future, high data rates in indoor environments and location awareness in difficult propagation channels. In this context, UWB system designers need an accurate knowledge of the radio propagation channel for systems performance through link level simulations. In this way, the UWB channel knowledge can be modelled in a deterministic manner. For this kind of channel modelling, three kinds of interactions are generally taken into account : reflection, transmission and diffraction. The authors have already studied, in a fastidious way, the reflection and transmission phenomena [1][2] using Geometrical Optics (GO). In this paper, we propose to study the impact of diffraction phenomenon on a UWB signal using the Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) [3] and the heuristic wedge diffraction coefficient of [4].