Performance Evaluation of 802.15.4 UWB PHYfor High Speed Data Rate under IEEE Channel Model

In modern day society the increase of data generation and transfer has been an issue that researchers are working on. This generated and shared data might have a different purpose but one thing is certain, the reception. This communication can cover continents, countries, cities or even just a few meters. For the purpose of the later, personal area networks (PAN) have been created with a main focus to lower the energy consumption. The protocol that is created under IEEE is 802.15.4 and it has multiple applications in the context of next generation sensor networks. This thesis investigates the performance IEEE 802.15.4 UWB PHY for high data rates over IEEE multipath fading channels and introduces receivers aiming to diversity and to mitigate the intersymbol interference (ISI) that might appear. We simulate the protocols highest mandatory data rate over slow, block faded, realistic IEEE channel models such as, residential, office, outdoor and industrial. The simulation includes Reed Solomon (RS) channel coding, optimal successive erasure decoding (SED), and coherent RAKE receivers. We verify that the selective RAKE (sRAKE) perform better than the nonselective RAKE (n-sRAKE) in all environments and also the increase of fingers is mandatory in order to improve performance. In cases with low number of fingers the ISI mitigation techniques like Maximum-Likehood Sequence Estimator (MLSE) & RAKE combination or Maximum Ration Combining (MRC) ISI cancellation receivers, can provide some gain in large delay spread environments. In cases with high number of fingers the MRC received employs its full diversity since the received power is larger than before. Overall the apply of optimal errors and erasures decoding can further improve the system performance by adding a small gain, lowering existing Bit Error Probability (BEP) even more.