Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband for Broadband Indoor Machine-to-Machine Communication Networks: System Performance Evaluation

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) networks have recently drawn significant attention as a result of the vast number of potential applications associated with them; however, consensus on the use of a standardized air interface protocol has not been reached yet. Due to their nature, M2M radio networks are expected to be densely populated and therefore prone to Multiple Access interference (MAI); in this paper, a radio interference evaluation framework is used to evaluate the performance of Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) as physical layer (PHY) for broadband M2M indoor networks. Considering an accurate channel model for the indoor environment, simulated results for the intra-network interference are presented. In order to obtain a realistic perspective of the system performance, different scenarios have been studied and the stochastic nature of both the network topology and the channel traffic have been taken into account. Finally, the use of a simple yet efficient power control scheme is proposed and evaluated yielding interesting results.