Grant: Special Research Opportunity Program - Project

This project is part of the European project "InfraStructures for broadband access in wireless/photonics and Integration of Strengths in Europe", approved in 2006 by the European Commission under the 6th Framework Programme of the Information Society Technologies, to develop new technologies for next-generation broadband access applications. As the only partner from Canada, we will concentrate our efforts on the investigation and development of innovative UWB-over-fiber technologies for broadband wireless access. UWB, approved by FCC in 2002 for unlicensed use, has been a hot area recently and has attracted great interests for short-range high-throughput wireless communication and sensor networks. Such short-range wireless networks can operate mainly in indoor environments in a standalone mode, with a nearly nonexistent integration into the fixed wired networks or wireless wide-area infrastructures. To offer availability of undisrupted service across different networks and eventually achieve high-rate data access at any time and from any place, a solution is to combine the UWB with fiber distribution technology, a new area called UWB over fiber. In this project, we will investigate UWB-over-fiber architectures and techniques to generated and distribute UWB signals in the optical domain.