Performance evaluation of the WiMedia PHY in WPAN environments and efficiency improvement by application of LDPC codes

This paper presents performance evaluation results of the ECMA-368 WiMedia physical layer (PHY) in terms of bit error rate (BER) versus E_b/N₀. The simulation results are based on a realistic channel model for indoor ultra wideband (UWB) wireless personal area network (WPAN) environments. Our investigations show that there is significant room for improvement and therefore we propose an enhancement to the channel coding scheme. By application of Shannon-limit approaching low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes we yield a performance gain of about 4 dB at the reference BER of 10^-5. Furthermore, our proposal leads to a convenient and expedient PHY and increases the system efficiency.