A localization and tracking application for UWB

An increasing demand for applications in the area of Ultra-Wideband Radio Technology led to the EUWB (Coexisting Short Range Radio by Advanced Ultra-Wideband Radio Technology, FP7-ICT-215669, www.euwb.eu) project, which has been started in April 2008. The goal of this industry-led initiative of major industrial and excellent academic organizations is the improvement, integration, and the applications of UltraWideband Radio Technology (UWB-RT). The EUWB project has significantly enhanced the scientific knowledge base in the UWB-RT and has provided sophisticated new applications enabled by UWB and highly demanded in several European key industrial sectors such as home entertainment consumer electronics, automotive, public transportation, and heterogeneous networks. Without a doubt, the efficient exploitation of cross-layer functionalities will lead to successful applications of UWB technologies. Beside the cognitive radio related technology, namely the Detect-And-Avoid (DAA) technology, the localization and tracking (LT) technology is a major aspect of EUWB, in particular the underlying LT protocol. Within the scope of this manuscript, the authors will give a brief overview of EUWB by illustrating its technical approach. Furthermore, the authors will describe a novel LT protocol as well as its application to a typical scenario. This application is tailored to operate also with UWB devices that do not fully comply with the previously proposed LT schemes which need specific physical and medium access control layer functionalities.