Transmitting multiple HD video streams over UWB links

Abstract

Ultra Wide Band technology has attracted a lot of attention recently as a viable solution for high data rate, low power, short-range wireless link. The growing multi-media home networking is demanding more bandwidth and wireless throughput has become a bottleneck for high quality multi-media services. With the maximum data rate above 100 Mbps, UWB is a perfect solution for such applications. This paper describes such a system that takes advantage of the high data rate offered by UWB. We first implemented the complete MB-OFDM PHY layer using multi-FPGA hardware and discrete RF design. Our implementation is fully compliant to the WiMedia/MBOA PHY specifications and the FCC power regulations. The system achieved 110Mbps maximum data rate with a BER better than 10 -6 over a range of 4 meters. Subsequently, we developed a testbed that demonstrates simultaneous transmission of multiple High Definition video streams over the MB-OFDM link. The use-case scenario is a Multimedia ClientServer application where we have one Media Server (transmitter) and several Media Players (receivers).