Studies in Wireless Home Networking Including Coexistence of UWB and IEEE 802.11a Systems

Abstract

Characteristics of wireless home and office services and the corresponding networking issues are discussed. Local Area Networking (LAN) and Personal Area Networking (PAN) technologies such as IEEE 802.11 and Ultra Wideband (UWB) are introduced. IEEE 802.11a and UWB systems are susceptible to interference from each other due to their overlapping frequencies. The major contribution of this work is to provide a framework for coexistence of the two systems. The interference between the two systems is evaluated theoretically by developing analytical models, and by simulations. It is shown that the interference from UWB on IEEE 802.11a systems is generally insignificant. IEEE 802.11a interference on UWB systems, however, is very critical and can significantly increase the bit error rate (BER) and degrade the throughput of the UWB system. A novel idea in the MAC layer is presented to mitigate this interference by means of temporal separation. Simulation results validate our technique. Implications to wireless home services such as high definition television (HDTV) are provided. Future research directions are discussed.