Investigation of Reconfigurability for the Digital Backend of Ultra Wideband Receiver

The next generation Wireless Personal Area Network and Wireless Sensor Network applications demand portability and ultra low power operation. Ultra Wideband communication has the potential to achieve these requirements due to possibility of digital implementation. The mostly digital UWB radio is designed to cope up with worst case channel condition and uses heavy parallelism in the digital backend leading to high power consumption during acquisition and synchronisation mode. However, for UWB pulse propagation, the wireless channel and time delay may vary due to various factors. This paper analyses the effect of different channel impulses and time delays on the required parallel hardware for receiver processing. This analysis is performed in order to investigate the real time reconfigurability approach for the digital UWB receiver in order to save power. The analysis shows that introduction of reconfigurability has a potential to reduce power consumption.