Experimental Demonstration of Interference Mitigation Using Ultra-Wideband Spreading

Abstract

Spectrum scarcity for wireless communication and data transfers has prompted interest to analyze interference among wireless links. As more bandwidth is utilized for communication links, there is a growing need to mitigate interference. By exploiting code division multiplexing (CDM) across an ultra-wideband (UWB) spectrum, it is possible to combat dynamic interference scenarios, including spot, sweep, barrage, or base interference. With this in mind, this paper presents a more generalized theoretical analysis of bit error rates (BER) in presence of dynamic interference scenarios. The presented approach is validated using an ultra-wideband secure communication link over a large contiguous 1.3 GHz bandwidth with direct digital conversion. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever validation for such UWB channel. As part of our assessment, this UWB system uses direct RF sampling of the received and transmitted signals. Overall, for the first time, code spreading across a 1.3 GHz band demonstrated up to 1000-fold interference mitigation. This new capability was evaluated experimentally using a custom wireless BER test bench.

Keywords

• Secure communication
• UWB-SDR radio
• CDM
• interference mitigation
• spread spectrum