RIC3: Reliability Improvement in UWB Networks Using Enhanced CCA and Complex Channels

The usage of ultra-wideband (UWB) radios in different IoT applications has increased in recent years. With the evergrowing traffic of UWB-based applications, delivering reliable communication becomes a challenge due to packet collision. Traditional collision avoidance methods are either not fully compatible with UWB technology or do not have the desired performance. In this work, RIC3, we introduced two approaches to improve the reliability of UWB communications in busy networks. First, we present a UWB-compatible collision avoidance (CA) solution to minimize unwanted collisions among UWB transmitters. Our second approach utilizes complex channels and modifies the configuration of the sender and receiver to isolate the link from other UWB applications' traffic. Using the latest UWB radio chip (DW3000), our real-world evaluation demonstrated link reliability of over 90% in a network with multiple UWB applications, gaining 30–60% improvement in different scenarios compared to previous recommendations.