Performance Evaluation of TH-BPPM and TH-BPAM with Private MAC in UWB Ad-hoc Networks

Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a killer technology for short-range wireless communications. In the past, most of the UWB research focused on physical layer but the unique characteristics of UWB make it different to design the upper layer protocols than conventional narrow band systems. Cross-layer protocols have received high attention for UWB networks. In this paper, we investigate the performance of two physical layer schemes: time hopping binary pulse position modulation (TH-BPPM) and time hopping binary pulse amplitude modulation (TH-BPAM) with proposed private MAC protocol for UWB ad-hoc networks. From pulse level to packet level simulation is done in network simulator ns-2 with realistic network environments for varying traffic load, mobility and network density. Our simulation result shows TH-BPAM outperforms TH-BPPM in high traffic load, mobility and dense network cases but in a low traffic load case identical performance is achieved.