Power controlled channel allocation for multiuser multiband UWB systems

Emerging ultra-wideband (UWB) technology offers a great potential for the design of high-speed short-range communications. However, in order for a UWB device to coexist with other devices, the transmitted power level of UWB is strictly limited by the FCC spectral mask. Such limitation poses a significant design challenge to any UWB system. An efficient management of the limited power is thus a key feature to fully exploit the advantages of UWB. In this paper, a cross layer multiuser multiband UWB scheme is proposed to obtain the optimal subband and power allocation strategy. Optimization criteria involve minimization of power consumption under the constraints on the packet error rate, the data rate, and the FCC limit. To ensure the system feasibility in variable channel conditions, an algorithm to jointly manage the rate assignment of UWB devices, subband allocation, and power control is proposed. A computationally inexpensive suboptimal approach is also developed to reduce the complexity of the problem, which is found to be NP hard. Simulation results under UWB channel model specified in the IEEE 802.15.3a standard show that the proposed algorithm achieves comparable performances to those of the complex optimal full search approach, and it can save up to 61% of transmit power compared to the current multiband scheme in the standard proposal. Moreover, the proposed algorithm can obtain the feasible solutions adaptively when the initial system is not feasible for the rate requirements of the users.