In the first part of our research on the communication side, we investigated whether existing concurrent transmission (CTX) techniques, based on IEEE 802.15.4 narrowband, could work with UWB. The Glossy and Crystal systems were tested in the CLOVES testbed and showed positive results, with higher reliability, lower latency, and better energy efficiency than narrowband.  This latter result, counterintuitive given the higher TX/RX consumption of UWB, stems from the characteristics of the radio and is confirmed by its use in CTX protocols for industrial control.

In the first part of our research on the communication side, we investigated whether existing concurrent transmission (CTX) techniques, based on IEEE 802.15.4 narrowband, could work with UWB. The Glossy and Crystal systems were tested in the CLOVES testbed and showed positive results, with higher reliability, lower latency, and better energy efficiency than narrowband.  This latter result, counterintuitive given the higher TX/RX consumption of UWB, stems from the characteristics of the radio and is confirmed by its use in CTX protocols for industrial control.

Our research also explored the definition of new CTX primitives. The Flick system uses only the presence/absence of the preamble of a packet to disseminate a global binary decision (on/off, true/false) with reliability >99.999% and reducing latency by 10x and energy by 4.4x compared to existing techniques, which earned the “best paper award” at the prestigious IPSN’23 conference.

The activities concerning CTX for ranging and localization started from the pioneering idea of concurrent ranging already developed by UNITN, which had demonstrated how the overlap in the channel impulse response (CIR) of signals from multiple transmitters can be used to simultaneously estimate their distance, but had also left open numerous problems. These were solved in NG-UWB, finalizing a complete system with accuracy similar to traditional techniques but with significant reduction of latency and energy.