Self-sustained UWB Sensing: A Link and Energy Adaptive Approach

Energy efficiency is a challenging issue in autonomous and distributed sensing systems, especially when these systems are powered by renewable energy sources. In this paper, we present a link and energy adaptive UWB-based sensing technique to improve the detection time coverage and detection range coverage for self-sustained embedded applications. The basic idea is derived from the fact that domain-specific information in such applications is often available. Thus, by jointly exploiting the link information between the transmitter and receiver of the UWB pulse radar, and the non-deterministic characteristics of the renewable energy, the proposed technique dynamically adjusts the pulse repetition frequency of the UWB radar to enhance the sustainable operation under the unreliable energy supply. The overhead of the proposed technique is negligible as compared with the overall energy consumption of the UWB pulse radar. It was demonstrated that the proposed technique can achieve much better detection time coverage and detection range coverage than the conventional UWB radar. The proposed technique is also insensitive to many practical issues such as the limited battery capacity.