A wideband technology for fine ranging
Pulse radio communication goes back to the early days of radio communications, based on inventions from Heinrich Hertz and Guglielmo Marconi. UWB is characterized by the transmission of extremely narrow pulses, with a duration of few nanoseconds, resulting in quite a wide spectrum of 500 MHz and more. This makes UWB signals relatively resistant to interferences and allows very accurate time of flight measurements.
The IEEE 802.15.4 standard defines two physical layers. One layer is for low pulse repetition frequencies (LRP UWB) of 1 MHz to 4 MHz. The other layer, mainly used in today’s applications, works with high pulse repetition frequencies (HRP UWB) ranging from 4 MHz to 250 MHz. The majority of applications using the defined high band channels in the range of 6 GHz to 10 GHz with a channel bandwidth of 499.2 MHz.