Ultra wideband (UWB) radio technology is nowadays one of the most promising technologies for medium-short range communications. It has a wide range of applications including Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) with simultaneous data transmission and location tracking. The combination of location and data transmission is important in order to increase flexibility and reduce the cost and complexity of the system deployment. In this scenario, accuracy is not the only evaluation criteria, but also the amount of resources associated to the location service, as it has an impact not only on the location capacity of the system but also on the sensor data transmission capacity. Although several studies can be found in the literature addressing UWB-based localization, these studies mainly focus on distance estimation and position calculation algorithms. Practical aspects such as the design of the functional architecture, the procedure for the transmission of the associated information between the different elements of the system, and the need of tracking multiple terminals simultaneously in various application scenarios, are generally omitted. This paper provides a complete system level evaluation of a UWB-based communication and location system for Wireless Sensor Networks, including aspects such as UWB-based ranging, tracking algorithms, latency, target mobility and MAC layer design. With this purpose, a custom simulator has been developed, and results with real UWB equipment are presented too.

In the last years, UWB (ultra-wide band) technology has been widely studied, thanks to its attractive features like low power consumption or high data rates. On the other hand, the coexistence issue has delayed the regulatory process in Europe and its development and introduction in the market. A peaceful coexistence is essential, not only for guaranteeing other radio services, but also for enabling the development of UWB applications interoperating with other wireless networks. Thus, interconnecting in the same device UWB and mobile network interface, like UMTS, will allow to widen the scope of WPAN applications, limited by the short range of UWB coverage. In this paper will be exposed the work performed in the development of an interworking platform between UWB and UMTS, which has allowed to carry out several coexistence tests, where UWB and UMTS was collocated in the same device.

In this paper, several options to achieve full mobility features for mobile terminals operating over Bluetooth based wireless personal area networks are proposed and evaluated. Evaluation has been made in terms of new call blocking and handoff call dropping probabilities, service and overall utilization. A number of design enhancements are incorporated over the basic procedures to minimize the effects of conservative resource reservations associated to mobile terminals in soft handoff and to improve the overall throughput