Software defined radio IR-UWB positioning platform for RFID and WSN application

This paper presents a software defined radio (SDR) platform for Impulse Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) sensing and positioning applications. The platform is composed by a software simulator (SW) and a hardware testbed (HW). The software simulator based on Matlab offers reconfigurable modules/functions of UWB systems with a graphic user interface (GUI). Correspondingly, the testbed is implemented by an oscilloscope and a set of off-the-shelf components. The oscilloscope (Lecroy WaveMaster 816Zi-A) features high-speed real-time sampling (i.e., 40 GS/s with 16 GHz analog bandwidth) with 4 independent channels, enabling a multi-antenna multichannel receiver network in UWB bands, with signal processing capability at the Nyquist rate. The SW and HW are seamlessly integrated by the build-in software in the oscilloscope. It allows rapid prototypes of various algorithms to be verified in real environments. Finally, a case study on UWB ranging for localization is given to demonstrate the feasibility and usability of the proposed platform.

I. Introduction

In the location-aware and context-aware Internet-of-things (IoT) applications, accurate positioning is highly desired. Impulse Ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radio employing ultrashort pulses offers the potential to achieve precise positioning in the dense multipath indoor environment thanks to its fine resolution in time domain.