First Steps in Benchmarking the Performance of Heterogeneous Ultra-Wideband Platforms

The recent gain in popularity of ultra-wideband (UWB) technology and the rapid development of new-generation transceivers triggered by the IEEE 802.15.4z amendment has led to a large number of UWB systems being deployed and to an increasingly heterogeneous ecosystem. This growing heterogeneity calls for quantitative performance comparisons across different hardware platforms on a large scale, so to identify their strength and weaknesses and to verify whether heterogeneous devices can interact with each other seamlessly. Additionally, the recent opening of the 6 GHz band has raised major concerns in the UWB community, as Wi-Fi 6E is now allowed to operate in the same unlicensed spectrum used by UWB devices. Therefore, the ability to examine and compare the performance of different UWB platforms in presence of Wi-Fi 6E interference is key to develop robust and dependable solutions. In this paper, we describe our first steps towards the development of a large-scale testbed facility that allows us to benchmark and shed light on the performance of different UWB platforms in the absence and presence of cross-technology interference, as well as on their interoperability. We further present preliminary results comparing the communication performance of old- and new-generation UWB platforms, namely the Decawave DW1000 and Qorvo DW3000, as a function of different physical layer settings and with or without co-located Wi-Fi 6E activity.