System performance of IEEE 802.15.4 low rate wireless PAN using UWB as alternate-PHY layer

Personal area networks (PANs) are expected to play an important role in future mobile ad-hoc wireless communications and information systems. This paper proposes an UWB-based alternate PHV layer for 802.15.4 low rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN) system with the intention to enhance such WPAN system with better location positioning capability. The proposed UWB transceiver operates in the first 500 MHz band, 3.1 - 3.6 GHz, within the FCC allocated UWB band. Original 802.15.4 code position modulation scheme is slightly modified to 2-PPM to cater UWB transmission. A simple peak detector based receiver is employed to sample and decode the transmitted symbol. Intensive simulation over IEEE 801.15.3a UWB channel models showed that the proposed UWB based alternate PHY layer can support 802.15.4 250 kbps 16-byte packet transmission over WPAN range of 5 m with 10% PER. It is also illustrated that, in general, PER increases over longer communication range and over longer channel delay spread.