Validation of the MB-OFDM Modulation for High Data Rate WSN for Satellite Ground Testing

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radio has been proposed for physical layer standard for high Speed wireless personal area network (WPANs). This paper evaluates Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) as the radio interface for new High Data Rate (HDR) Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for satellite ground testing. A commercially available development kit was used to perform measurements on a satellite mock-up which were validated on an Eurostar-3000 satellite structure. Generic software developed tests all the parameter set combinations to help during identification of the relevant parameters. Different sort of antennas, passive repeaters and error correcting codes are mixed to evaluate the best tradeoff. The results show good performances for MB-OFDM in the targeted WSN application. A maximum achievable data rate with less than 8% of frame error rate of 92 Mbits/s is demonstrated.