Performance Comparison with Different Pulse Waveforms in Ultra-wideband Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently approved IEEE 802.15.4a standard defines an ultra-wideband (UWB) based physical layer technique, and performance analysis of UWB systems shows that the pulse waveform will affect the received SINR when multipath interference, multiple access interference and additive white Gaussian noise are considered. In order to obtain an optimal pulse waveform in UWB based wireless sensor networks, the normalized SNR is firstly proposed without the effect of pulse waveform, and then three pulse waveforms are analyzed and compared in different channels. Finally, the critical value of normalized SNR for different pulse waveforms is drawn with different transmission data rates and user numbers. Results show that the performance of UWB systems is affected by power efficiency and correlation property of transmitted pulse waveform together. And the pulse with high power efficiency shows better performance in low SNR, and the pulse with good correlation property shows better performance in high SNR.