INESC TEC paper awarded in conference on ultrawide band technology and systems

The paper “An Energy Study on IR-UWB Transmitter Using Integration-and-Fire Modulation” received a best student paper at the IEEE International Conference on Ultra-WideBand (ICUWB 2014). The paper was written by INESC TEC researchers Iman Kianpour, Bilal Hussain, Vítor Grade Tavares, Cândido Duarte (Centre for Telecommunications and Multimedia – CTM), Hélio Mendonça (Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems – CROB) and invited researcher José Carlos Príncipe.

The paper proposes a new type of modulation for Impulse Radio Ultrawide Band (IR-UWB) which makes it possible to reduce energy consumption in the transmitters. The goal with this paper “was to demonstrate that by using the type of modulation proposed by the authors, it would be possible to obtain substantial gains in terms of energy efficiency in IR-UWB communication systems,” Vítor Grade Tavares explains. “This added efficiency is possible because a lower amount of data is transmitted, and the classic digital-analogic convertors are eliminated, and for that reason a converter is necessary with a potential consumption in the order of nW. The architecture of the transmitter also becomes quite elementary,” he adds.

The ICUWB 2014 took place in Paris, France, between 1 and 3 September. The conference is a forum where researchers share the last advances in ultrawide band technology and systems and similar areas of application: cognitive radio, sensor radio and Internet of things.

The INESC TEC researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: INESC Porto and FEUP.