Performance Comparison of Ultra-Wideband Time-Hopping, DSSS and OFDM Multiple Access Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio communication systems operate using extremely short duration base-band pulses. This paper compares the performance of three competing multiple access modulation schemes that have been proposed for application to UWB based wireless sensor networks. These multiple access schemes are ultra-wideband Time-Hopping (TH-UWB), Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS-UWB) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM-UWB). Each system was investigated under four operating conditions of different bandwidths and bit rates for three different transmission ranges. The attributes measured to compare the performance of the multiple access schemes under consideration were packet link error rate, throughput and energy efficiency. TH-UWB outperforms DSSS-UWB and OFDM-UWB for high bandwidth conditions. Whereas, DSSS-UWB performs better in low bandwidth conditions compared to the other two systems. Decreasing the transmission range significantly degrades the overall performance of the systems.