Multiband-OFDM: A New Physical Layer Proposal for Ultra-Wide-Band communications

This paper investigates the Multi-band OFDM (MB-OFDM) based physical (PHY) layer proposal for IEEE 802.15.3a working group on short-range high data-rate Ultra-wide-Band (UWB) communications. An overview of the MB-OFDM PHY layer architecture with its various parameters is presented and the optimal choice of critical parameters is discussed. Next, we derive the theoretical uncoded bit error rate (BER) of MB-OFDM over the Rayleigh fading channel. Performance results over realistic IEEE UWB channel models are analyzed and compared to a pulsed-OFDM based approach. Although pulsedOFDM was presented in the literature as an enhancement to the MB-OFDM approach, simulation results showed that with same redundancy-factor, both systems address almost similar BER performance.