Ultra-wideband (also UWB, and ultra-wide-band, ultra-wide band, etc.) usually refers to a radio modulation technique based on transmitting very-short-duration pulses, often of duration of only nanoseconds or less, whereby the occupied bandwidth goes to very large values. Ultra-wide-band may also be used to refer to anything with a very large bandwidth (e.g.: a type of sampling rate in the Speex speech codec). This article discusses the meaning in radio communications.

There are two major methods used to modulate waveforms: Time-modulated pulse-position modulation and bi-phase-modulated pulse-position modulation. By long-established practice, the radio modulation technique, UWB, is considered to occupy a fractional bandwidth of 20% or greater, or a bandwidth of 250 MHz or more, of spectrum. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission restricts UWB to fractional bandwidth of 20% or greater, or bandwidths of 500 MHz or more (not 250 MHz), but has a proposal pending to drop this restriction.

The processing gain of UWB, defined as the ratio of occupied bandwidth relative to the modulation bandwidth, is similar to spread spectrum for transmission. However, UWB is only typically able to benefit from processing gain during transmission. Reception of UWB is usually based on time-correlation of pulses, and the receiving benefits of processing gain possible with spread spectrum are not usually realized in practice.

In February 2002 Federal Communication Commission (FCC) approved a spectral mask for operation of UWB devices. The major part of it lies between 3.1 and 10.6 GHz with allowed effective isotropic radiated power (EIRP) of -41.3dBm/MHz. It has been proposed that impulse radio systems (that transmit very narrow pulses) are good candidates to satisfy these constraints. However, OFDM-based technologies (called multi-band UWB) are also under consideration to meet the FCC requirements.

Ultra-wideband or UWB is a developing communication technology that delivers very high speed network data exchange rates across relatively short distances with a low power source. Although the connection speed decreases quickly as a function of distance, UWB has the potential to replace the cables that currently connect devices.

UWB can potentially deliver data faster than 802.11b. This might make LANs and WANS obsolete. However, UWB suffers from synchronization requirements due to the very low Duty cycle pulses employed.

See also: Wireless | Network | Bandwidth | Fat-Pipe