A high-precision ultra wideband impulse radio physical layer model for network simulation

Ultra Wideband Impulse Radio (UWB-IR) technology has received a lot of attention from the radio engineering community during the past few years. It features a number of attractive characteristics for wireless sensor networks, among which an ultra low power consumption, a strong robustness to interference and a high accuracy ranging capability. Unfortunately, its time-based nature makes it difficult to model in a network simulator. Although some mathematical models have been proposed, all of them are limited to a particular modulation type, a specific receiver architecture and often to a channel model. This situation has slowed down the development of communication protocols specifically designed for these radios. This paper presents a novel symbol-level simulator for UWB-IR which can accurately model pathloss, large-scale fading, small-scale fading and collisions. This physical layer is used to implement a model of an IEEE 802.15.4A UWBIR radio transceiver based on energy detection. To the knowledge of the authors, this is the first network simulation model of IEEE 802.15.4A UWB-IR radios, the first model of an energy-detection receiver and more generally the first network simulation model of symbol-level UWB-IR. It offers several channel models of various complexity, so that exploratory simulations can be run quickly and high precision results can be generated when desired. This simulation model allows to evaluate precisely the bit error rate and in particular the impact of collisions, a major cause of energy waste at the medium access control level.