Simulation of the Impact of Antennas and Indoor Channels on UWB Transmission by Ray Tracing and Measured Antenna Patterns

During the development stage of a UWB system, system simulations are helpful to evaluate the system performance. System simulations demand for accurate description and modeling of the entire system, whereas the computation time must be small. In many cases, system simulators are based on idealized assumptions and neglect effects of non-ideal hardware. In reality however, real UWB antennas can corrupt signal transmission. This paper presents a system simulator that can deal with non-ideal, measured complex antenna patterns. It is shown how antenna patterns impact signal transmission in typical indoor scenarios. To describe multipath propagation within small computation time, full-wave solutions of Maxwell's equations cannot be performed. Instead, a UWB Ray Tracing tool developed at the Institut für Höchstfrequenztechnik und Elektronik is used and expanded by complex pattern information to take into account the influence of antennas. The system simulator determines the distorted signal and reconstructs the bit sequence by a conventional correlation receiver.