Designing optimal pulse-shapers for ultra-wideband radios

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is gaining increasing interest for its potential application to short-range indoor wireless communications. Utilizing ultra-short pulses, UWB baseband transmissions enable rich multipath diversity, and can be demodulated with low complexity receivers. Compliance with the FCC spectral mask, and interference avoidance to, and from, co-existing narrow-band services, calls for judicious design of UWB pulse shapers. This paper introduces pulse shaper designs for UWB radios, which optimally utilize the bandwidth and power allowed by the FCC spectral mask. The resulting baseband UWB systems can be either single-band, or, multi-band. More important, the novel pulse shapers can support dynamic avoidance of narrow-band interference, as well as efficient implementation of fast frequency hopping, without invoking analog carriers.