Towards Next-generation Ultra-Wideband Technology

Recent advances in Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology, in the form of techniques to perform secure and enhanced ranging – defined in IEEE 802.15.4z, has gained a lot of traction for UWB in the market. Many companies together in Consortia like FiRa and Connected Car Consortium (CCC) are working towards harnessing the capabilities of UWB to realize many use cases. The capabilities of UWB are much more than accurate ranging. UWB can be used for high resolution sensing and data transfer as well. Also, like any other technology, there is a scope to enhance the performance of existing UWB technology by introducing and modifying the core techniques. This has driven researchers and the market alike to enhance ranging techniques, introduce sensing and data transfer techniques, to harness the capabilities of UWB to the fullest. This motive has brought together UWB enthusiasts in the IEEE task group TG4ab under IEEE 802.15 working group. In the task group, many new features as well as enhancements to existing techniques are being discussed. In this paper, we will look into the direction of the research towards next generation UWB. We discuss in details about enhancements like Narrow band assistance, multi-millisecond UWB, co-scheduling ranging and sensing etc. being discussed in TG4ab to define the next generation UWB standard IEEE 802.15.4ab. We also present a few use cases, which form the background for technology enablers being proposed in the task group and being discussed in consortia like FiRa, CCC as future use cases of UWB.

I. Introduction

Research on Ultra-Wideband technology began in late 90s and was first standardized in early 2000s [1] when FCC opened up a chunk of spectrum from 3.1-10.6 GHz for unlicensed operation, with various power and other regulatory restrictions. UWB technology was researched for various applications including data transfer, indoor localization and sensing. With other data oriented technologies taking over, UWB majorly evolved as a positioning and localization technology. The latest amendment to existing UWB standards in IEEE in the form of IEEE 802.15.4z [2], which defines core PHY and MAC for ranging operations of UWB, has attracted a lot of interest from device manufacturers and service providers to provide UWB enabled localization features in their products like tags, smart locks etc. To build the UWB ecosystem, multiple companies have come together to form consortia like FiRa consortium [3]. FiRa consortium has been working on defining a framework of operation at higher layers and is coming up with use cases and certification programs.