UWB Impact on IEEE802.11b Wireless Local Area Network

In this paper the impact of ultra wideband (UWB) interference on IEEE802.11b WLAN performance is studied through experimental tests. Extremely high power UWB transmitters, that are not FCC compliant, were used in the tests to simulate the impact of very high UWB device concentration. The measurement setup was organized to allow the UWB transmitters to generate as much interference to the WLAN network as possible. Configurations were examined with various distances between the UWB transmitters and WLAN receiver. Peer-to-peer connection and link via access point were studied in office environment during the regular office hours. The results showed that the UWB population corresponding thousands of FCC compatible devices will decrease the network performance if the interference sources were near the device to be interfered. However, if the interference distance is longer than 50 cm significant decrease in the throughput cannot be seen. In real life, this high UWB population is absurd. Taking into account the reasonable amount of simultaneous UWB devices in a certain area these experiments do not show any significant harm to WLAN network throughput.