Coexistence of MB-OFDM UWB with Impulse Radio UWB and other radio systems

Abstract

The level of interference caused by Ultra-Wideband (UWB) systems in current radio services has been widely studied, both theoretically and with measurement campaigns, although most of them focus on pulse-based UWB systems. This paper presents experimental results on the coexistence of Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) UWB systems when they are working in close proximity to other radio technologies such as UMTS, WiMAX, LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth and ZigBee. As restrictive spectrum masks have been imposed to UWB, no degradation is detected on those systems except for WiMAX as it operates in the same frequency band. On the other hand, MB-OFDM may be disturbed even by systems operating in a different frequency band due to spurious out-of-band emissions. The coexistence between MB-OFDM and Impulse Radio (IR) UWB systems is also addressed and experimental results are presented showing that IR UWB may interfere with MB-OFDM UWB systems causing a degradation on Packet Error Rate, which is limited due to the low activity factor of IR UWB.