Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/F030843/1
Title:	Novel Receiver Designs for UWB Wireless Communication
Principal Investigator:	Chen, Professor Y
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Sch of Engineering
Organisation:	University of Warwick
Scheme:	First Grant Scheme
Starts:	01 February 2008	Ends:	31 July 2011	Value (£):	211,628
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Digital Signal Processing RF & Microwave Technology
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	No relevance to Underpinning Sectors
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 18 Oct 2007 ICT Prioritisation Panel (Technology) Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
Nowadays, most consumer electronics and computer peripherals require wires to the user control devices. With the development of modern life, more and more devices will appear in our home and office, and the trouble of fiddling with all these wires will eventually become intolerable. Wireless communication provides an attractive solution, owing to its unique mobility. Current wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth , have already enabled us to enjoy the unprecedented convenience of using internet, keyboard, headset, and other devices wirelessly. There are more wireless applications, such as digital imaging and video streaming, where a much higher data rate is needed. Ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) is an ultimate way of unwiring our life. By using an extremely large bandwidth spanning several gigahertzes, UWB provides short-range wireless interconnections with data rates of up to several gigabits per second, high enough to replace most cables in current home and office devices. In 2002, the Federal Communications Commission approved deployment of UWB in the United States. In a study conducted by Mason Communications and DotEcon for the Office of Communications, it is estimated that UWB can generate a net value of more than 6 billion pounds for the economy of the United Kingdom by 2020 under a European regulation. The above applications of UWB focus on achieving an extremely high data rate using the ultra-wide bandwidth. In other applications, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and wireless body area networks (WBANs), where power consumption is more important than data rate, UWB has also been explored to achieve extremely low power consumption at a low data rate. WSNs are used in surveillance and disaster area monitoring to improve public safety and increase environmental awareness. WBANs are used in hearing aids and health monitoring to diagnose disease and save life. Battery life is a key factor to both WSNs and WBANs. UWB device operates at an ultra-low power thousands or even tens of thousands times smaller than conventional wireless devices and is very suitable for WSNs and WBANs. The commercial use of UWB technology was proposed only nine years ago, and its regulation was passed only five years ago. Owing to its huge market value, UWB has attracted great research interest from both universities and industries in recent years. Much of this research focuses on designs of transmitters and receivers for UWB systems. In applications where high data rate is desired, Rake receivers have been widely used to achieve superior performances at the cost of a complex structure. Rake receivers require signal timing information, which is provided by synchronization. In the literature, a two-dimensional search for symbol timing offset and frame timing offset was implemented for synchronization. This search was also simplified to two suboptimal one-dimensional searches. The effect of synchronization errors on performances of Rake receivers was evaluated. Also, in applications where low power consumption is desired, transmit-reference receivers and energy detection receivers have been frequently adopted to achieve reasonably good performances with a simple structure. In this document, an integrated research program involving three related topics for investigation and the training of three research students is proposed. The research program aims to design new UWB synchronizers that achieve synchronization within a much shorter period of time than previous synchronizers to increase system efficiency and reduce implementation cost, to design new UWB transmit-reference receivers with improved performance that provide higher quality of service using less system resources than previous receivers, and to analyze UWB Rake and transmit-reference receivers with synchronization errors using more important performance measures than previous analyses and to optimize previous receivers based on these new analyses.
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Organisation Website:	http://www.warwick.ac.uk