Pulse sense: a method to detect a busy medium in pulse-based ultra wideband (UWB) networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a new MAC scheme for pulse-based UWB ad hoc networks. The proposed scheme provides distributed medium access through pulse sense, which is similar to carrier sense in narrowband systems, and it is suitable for low power applications with light traffic. The key idea of the pulse sense mechanism is to examine spectral power components of the received signal, which avoids searching for narrow pulses in the time domain. Simulations show that the proposed pulse sense method achieves high probability of detection with low probability of false alarm. Further, the pulse sense circuit detects pulses in a short time, is moderate in hardware complexity, and is insensitive to timing jitter, interference, and varying channel conditions.