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INFORMATION
UKoloS – Ultra-Wideband Radio Technologies for Communications, Localization and Sensor Applications
Best Practice for Industrial Wireless Applications
Wireless connectivity has the potential to provide
substantial benefits in industrial environments;
for example, with an increase in mobility
or a reduction in cabling costs. However,
it imposes tight challenges on reliability and
energy supply. In order to accomplish these
challenges protocol and hardware design must
Motivation
The demand for self-configuring wireless networks for
industrial control and sensing is experiencing a surge.
For widespread market success, low cost and low power
is also of major importance. Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband
(IR-UWB) is a particularly suitable technique for the
development of such networks. Its inherent high temporal
resolution reinforces its robustness against fading and
multiple access interference, making uncoordinated access
to the channel possible. Further, low cost and low complexity
implementation possibilities arise from its baseband
nature.
Challenges
Advantageously, the inherent high temporal resolution of
IR-UWB, allows low data rate scenarios to be realized with
ALOHA, a physical-layer independent and low complexity
approach. Provided that the system’s load is low, compared
to the system bandwidth, recent work has proven
the successful performance of the ALOHA principle. However,
in self-configuring network scenarios, one can think
of situations for which this approach may lead to inefficient
and undesirable performance. For instance, if applications
requesting higher QoS or increases load are involved.
Sensor nodes are predominantly battery-operated, and in
many cases not rechargeable, thus energy conservation is
another important issue for protocol design in these networks.
Power control and activity management are two
FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM L3S L3S RESEARCH CENTER
offer a unified solution. The uKoLoS project
aims at developing a medium access control
(MAC) scheme that enables efficient and lowpower
communications using Impulse Radio
ultra Wideband (IR-uWB) radio technology in
industrial applications.
The main research effort of the uKoLoS project
consists of the design of a novel, cross-layer,
cognitive, MAC approach for low data rate, low
power communications using IR-uWB radio. The
approach consists of a rate adaptation function,
which handles impulsive interference by autonomously
adapting the links’s pulse rate (transmitted
pulses per second), and a power saving
function, which controls the sensors sleep/active
cycles.
main schemes for minimizing the energy consumption in
wireless sensor networks. Since IR-UWB technology is characterized
by the power efficiency of transmitter as well as
the short-time data transmission, trying to save energy by
means of activity management scheme is much more purposeful
in this framework.
UKoLoS addresses these two major challenges by means of :
• a rate adaptation function which allows IR-UWB links to
share the spectrum in a way that it is fair, efficient and
compatible with individual QoS requirements
• an activity management function to regulate the devices
sleep/active cycles