In this paper a complete analysis of the non-idealities in Ultra Wideband (UWB) systems is presented, from both a component point of view and a system point of view. The behaviour of a realistic UWB transmission scenario is investigated with both simulations and measurements of fabricated components.
I. INTRODUCTIONUltra Wideband (UWB) is a wireless technology, whose usage of a very huge bandwidth permits to achieve many advantages for different applications: for example, high data rate for communication applications, high resolution for Radar and localization purposes … [1].Since the allocation of a frequency band for UWB purposes in US [2] and in Europe [3], many contributions of UWB components have been presented in literature: antennas, filters, RF-front end… [1]. Moreover, also many system aspects (such as bit-error-rate (BER), signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), …) of the UWB transmission have been assessed.One crucial aspect in UWB systems is the non-idealities of the system itself. The non-idealities provoke a worsening of the transmission and hence a changing of the system performance w.r.t. the ideally expected one. Hence, the investigation of the impact of the non-idealities on the system performance is an important task. Moreover, having a quantification of these non-idealities permits to introduce correction strategies.The aim of this paper is to investigate the non-idealities in the RF-front end and to quantify their impact on the signal transmission. The paper concentrates on a communication point of view. A similar, dedicated analysis could be extended also to Radar scenarios.The paper is organized as follows: in the next section the UWB transmission is presented, deriving the UWB radio link equation for impulse radio transmissions and highlighting the non-idealities of each component of the UWB transmission system. In Section III the non-idealities of the presented UWB scenario are investigated. Finally, in the last section the impact of these non-idealities on a realistic UWB communication scenario is assessed, calculating the worsening of the BER when real component are consider w.r.t. the case of an ideal system. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This work was supported by COST Action IC0803 "RF/Microwave communication subsystems for emerging wireless technologies" (RFCSET).