A Simulation Environment for UWB Hardware Development and Protocol Design

Modelling the physical layer of an ultra-wideband impulse radio in presence of interference and multipath channels is a demanding task and involves a couple of assumptions and simplifications which have a strong impact on the performance of network simulations. Even more important, most of these models cannot predict the influence on the ranging estimate produced by ultra-wideband systems. These ranging estimates are critical for localization systems, which are one of the main use cases for ultra-wideband technology. In this contribution we present a physical layer simulation environment that is able to simulate the impact of interference, multipath, noise, pulse shape and hardware components like amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters and more on bit error rate and ranging error. Parallel computing is employed to keep simulation times in a reasonable time frame, while simulation results and input parameters are stored in a database to allow an easy exchange of data with third party software. With this software system architects are able to simulate UWB system level behavior and tweak individual parameters to achieve optimal overall performance.