Rate-scalable UWB for WPAN with heterogeneous nodes

The desire for untethered communications spurs increasing interests in wireless sensor networks (WSN) and multimedia communications, including wireless personal area networks (WPAN) with variable rates over a short range. Emerging as a promising candidate for these applications, ultra-wideband (UWB) is gaining increasing attention. However, existing research on UWB overlooks one critical issue in enabling seamless network communications: the heterogeneity among network nodes. This paper addresses this issue by designing simple transmission and reception schemes between network nodes with different sampling rates. Our novel communication schemes designed for asymmetric transceiver pairs are readily applicable to achieve seamless communications among heterogeneous network nodes with multi-access capability. We also establish a general system model, which facilitates further delineation and optimization of complexity-performance-rate tradeoffs.