Capacity Analysis of UWB systems in Realistic Multipath Channels

In this paper we combine the main results obtained within the ULTRAWAVES project on two critical issues: the characterization of the UWB propagation channel and the assessment of the capacity of an UWB system operating in a typical office environment. Based on the experimental data collected through a wide measurement campaign in a typical European office environment, we evaluate the performance of a single UWB link in a realistic multipath environment using either binary pulse position or pulse amplitude modulation. These data are used to extract the SNR specification for a target bit error probability. Then we use it to evaluate the system outage probability with a novel semi-analytic approach also described in the paper. A realistic master-slave UWB network based on DS-CDMA is considered and its capacity is expressed in terms of the average number of users served with a required outage probability level. The proposed approach is quite flexible and allows us to easily include realistic path loss models, power control mechanism and intra system interference.