The performance of UWB-communication in an industrial environment

In this work the ECMA-368 Standard concerning its performance for the use in industrial communication systems with low latency requirements is investigated. Based on a pair of a generator and an analyser an extensive measurement campaign was carried out. A high-bay warehouse was chosen as a representative environment and an anechoic chamber was selected as a reference. In order to evaluate the transmission quality, the characteristics of the update time, the packet error rate and the packet loss rate were used as a metric. The specific transmission characteristics of 10 logical channels in the frequency ranges of 3.1 GHz to 4.8 GHz and 6.3 GHz to 8.0 GHz have been explored. For each logical channel eight different data rates and data lengths between 50 bytes and 500 bytes were taken into account. The different measurement scenarios are varying in distance and viewing conditions. Depending on the configuration, update times of less than 50 milliseconds at distances of up to 7m under non-line-of-sight conditions were measured.