The objective of this research is to alleviate potential outages in outdoor ultrawideband communications systems due to shadowing and other challenging propagation environments by exploiting the frequency-dependent distortion of individual multipath components. The approach is to create a novel physical model and to use it in testing robust receiver algorithms and adaptive transmission methods for outdoor ultrawideband systems.
Intellectual Merit: A novel outdoor ultrawideband channel model that provides typical and challenging data sets and insights required for designing and validating communications methods is developed. Robust low-complexity receivers and adaptive transmission methods for ultrawideband radio frequency channels with frequency dependent propagation gains are investigated. The transformative idea involves transmission of pulses either in the lower (up to 1 GHz) or upper (above 3 GHz) band of the ultrawideband spectrum (as specified by the Federal Communication Commission's mask), depending upon which is stronger. Ultrawideband research to date has focused on transmission of pulses only in the upper band. The benefits and feasibility of selecting different parts of the spectrum adaptively are exploited in this project.
Broader impacts: The project advances the state of the art in physical wireless channel modeling and ultrawideband transceiver algorithms. It has the potential to improve physical layer ultrawideband systems and cross-layer wireless network design. This research is an interdisciplinary effort in communication theory, physics, and signal processing. Through thesis and class projects this research will provide diverse graduate and undergraduate students with versatile skills essential for future career success.
