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Intel Demonstrates 220Mbps Variant of UWB
MattyIce writes "InfoWorld has a story about a yet to be approved standard for a high-speed, short distance communications standard. Last year, Intel demonstrated 100MBPS speeds but they have bumped the speed up to 220MBPS this time." Fast stuff, but I imagine it'll be a long time before it comes to market. I haven't even upgraded my wireless network to 802.11g yet!
IEEE hasn't even ratified 802.11g yet!
The article is talking about megabits (Mbps), not megabytes (MBps) as mentioned above. Capitalization matters on that acronym.
Originally the term "Ultra Wide Band" designated a special modulation technique but in February 2003 the FCC approved a standard to define UWB-communication as a communication with a minimal 10-dB bandwidth of 20% of the center frequency.
The original modulation scheme associated with UWB works almost as Pulse Position Modulation (PPM): Within a certain, fixed time slot a very short pulse with high energy is emitted. The position of the pulse is decided by a in advance determined code scheme. Depending of the code scheme and the pulse position, the time slot is interpreted as containing either a 0 or a 1.
The powerfull short pulses can be shown to have a very weak and very wide representation in the frequency domain. Without knowing the coding scheme in a link, a UWB signal is thus seen as noise.
Walls and other obstacles tend to obstruct certain specific frequencies only. Since UWB signals have Ultra Wide Bandwith, UWB communication can theroretically go through all kinds of natural obstacles very easily.
The hard part in UWB is making an antenna, that can actually emit signals with this very high bandwidth. Normal antennas are designed to emit in a narrow band. Thus, to make UWB work flawlessly, a lot of research must be made to make a good antenna.
Disclaimer: EE student (only) in the field of Wireless Communication Networks.
Judging from the frequency of this network, between 3.1GHz and 10.6GHz, the distance must be limited to the size of a PAN (personal area network). The article puts how useful it is to replace bluetooth as the medium of transfer for PANs (also, it solves the conflict between bluetooth 802.11b, since they use the frequency bands).
Perhaps one day we'll be able to synchronize our ipods over this connections; it beats connecting the firewire cable anytime! I can even put the ipod in the pocket. Something that we can already accomplish with bluetooh, minus the available bandwidth (and also minimizes interference with WLAN networks).
For longer radius of operation, 802.11a is suggested to be used (for example between buildings).
The discone antenna is simple to construct and has very wide bandwidth.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat