Pulsed and non-pulsed OFDM ultra wideband wireless personal area networks

In this paper, we describe the leading proposal to the IEEE 802.15.3a wireless personal area networks (WPAN) standardization effort. That proposal relies on ultra wideband (UWB) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). We then propose an enhancement of the baseline system that uses pulsed sinusoids instead of continuous sinusoids to send information in parallel over different sub-carriers. Pulsating OFDM symbols spreads the spectrum of the modulated signals in the frequency domain leading to enhanced performance in multipath fading environments and reduced complexity and power consumption. We also provide a summary of the differences between pulsed OFDM and generalized UWB-OFDM that was proposed earlier. Finally, we present simulation results to confirm the advantages of pulsed UWB OFDM over non-pulsed wideband OFDM.