Power allocation for multi-band OFDM UWB communication networks

Ultra wideband (UWB) technology has shown significant advantages over other existing ones for short- or medium-range high speed communications. It can adopt different modulation and signaling formats, among which multi-band OFDM is a more favorable candidate for the upcoming standard. Though extensive study on the physical layer has been conducted, limited work exists in the literature on design of medium access control (MAC) layer protocols. This paper proposes an efficient low-complexity power allocation technique for clustered multi-band OFDM UWB networks. The idea is to assign a unique power for each cluster while maximizing the total throughput. The method shows much superiority over an existing framework that selects only the cluster with the highest quality each time. Its performance also approaches the standard water-filling scheme in many cases but with much reduced complexity. The method is tested for a mandatory 1.8 GHz UWB band suggested in a standard proposal.