An empirical study of electromagnetic interference caused by ultra wideband transmissions in an IEEE 802.11a wireless local area network

Military communications require the rapid deployment of mobile high-bandwidth systems. This work characterizes the electromagnetic interference (EMI) effects of ultra wideband (UWB) transmissions on an IEEE 802.11a ad-hoc network throughput performance. Radiated measurements in an anechoic chamber investigate interference performance for three binary modulation schemes including bi-phase shift keying (BPSK), pulse position modulation (PPM), and on-off keying (OOK) and four pulse repetition frequencies (PRF) transmitted over two unlicensed national information infrastructure (U-NII) channels. Results indicate that OOK and BPPM can degrade throughput performance by up to twenty percent at lower PRF and lower U-NII channels. Minimal performance degradation (less than one percent) due to interference is observed for BPSK at the lower PRF and higher U-NII channels.