An Ultra-Wideband (UWB) pulse dispersion study for antennas in sensor network applications

UWB pulse dispersion studies performed with antennas aligned in a linear co-polarized fashion are inadequate for many sensor network applications, as the antennas may in practice have arbitrary orientations with respect to each other. Variations of the pulse response at different antenna orientations may significantly affect data integrity. In this work it was found that a circular monopole geometry performed reasonably well in terms of maintaining pulse shape over orientation changes. The results were analyzed using the correlation coefficient as the performance metric. The information provided in this paper should be useful in characterizing antennas for UWB sensor network applications.