UWB Technology to Enhance the Performance of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Ultra-wideband (UWB) transmission is an emerging wireless communication technology with unique potential characteristics, such as high-rate, low-power transmission, immunity to multipath propagation and precise positioning capability. This technique, based mainly on the Impulse-Radio (IR) paradigm, has gained interest significant for future broadband wireless access. The unique characteristics not only pose unprecedented challenges, but also offer great flexibility in the design process of efficient protocols for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), i.e., networks of interconnected sensing devices capable of retrieving and relaying multimedia content, such as video and audio streams, still images, and scalar sensor data, over the wireless medium. In this paper we discuss the applicability of the UWB transmission technique in WMSNs and we identify potential challenges in this area. Finally, we identify the cross-layer dependencies between the specified physical layer and the higher layers of the communication stack and investigate open research issues.