On the Energy Consumption and Ranging Accuracy of Ultra-Wideband Physical Interfaces

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication is attracting increased interest for its high-accuracy distance measurements. However, the typical current consumption of tens to hundreds of mA during transmission and reception might make the technology prohibitive to battery-powered devices in the Internet of Things. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard specifies two UWB physical layer interfaces (PHYs), with low- and high-rate pulse repetition (LRP and HRP, respectively). While the LRP PHY allows a more energy-efficient implementation of the UWB transceiver than its HRP counterpart, the question is whether some ranging quality is lost in exchange. We evaluate the trade-off between power and energy consumption, on the one hand, and distance measurement accuracy and precision, on the other hand, using UWB devices developed by Decawave (HRP) and 3db Access (LRP). We find that the distance measurement errors of 3db Access devices have at most 12 cm higher bias and standard deviation in line-of-sight propagation and 2-3 times higher spread in non-line-of-sight scenarios than those of Decawave devices. However, 3db Access chips consume 10 times less power and 125 times less energy per distance measurement than Decawave ones. Since the LRP PHY has an ultra-low energy consumption, it should be preferred over the HRP PHY when energy efficiency is critical, with a small penalty in the ranging performance.