Ultra wide band (UWB) techniques are promising candidates for both high resolution radar applications and high data rate communication links. While UWB-principles were applied exclusively by the military some thirty years ago due to high costs and restrictive regulations, this technique gained much attention after the publication of a revision of part 15 of the US-FCC-regulations in February 2002. There has never been a bandwidth allocation for a wireless and terrestrial communication system with such an enormous bandwidth of 7.5 GHz potentially offering data rates up to 1 gigabit per second. Similarly, sensing applications will benefit from exceptionally enhanced radar resolution.
As far as sensing applications are concerned, compact hardware solutions for generating and receiving UWB-radar pulses and algorithms for evaluating time domain data of radar measurements will be presented at this workshop. Communications issues will be discussed in two contributions covering receiver architectures for UWB, with a special focus on low-complexity sub-optimal schemes such as the transmitted-reference technique, and a discussion on the modelling and design of these receivers taking into consideration the multipath propagation channel and interferences.