IEEE P802.15.4ab

This amendment enhances the Ultra Wideband (UWB) physical layers (PHYs) medium access control (MAC), and associated ranging techniques while retaining backward compatibility with enhanced ranging capable devices (ERDEVs). Areas of enhancement include: additional coding, preamble and modulation schemes to additional coding, preamble and modulation schemes to support improved link budget and/or reduced air-time relative to IEEE Std 802.15.4 UWB; additional channels and operating frequencies; interference mitigation techniques to support greater device density and higher traffic use cases relative to the IEEE Std 802.15.4 UWB; improvements to accuracy, precision and reliability and interoperability for high-integrity ranging; schemes to reduce complexity and power consumption; definitions for tightly coupled hybrid operation with narrowband signaling to assist UWB; enhanced native discovery and connection setup mechanisms; sensing capabilities to support presence detection and environment mapping; and mechanisms supporting low-power low-latency streaming as well as high data-rate streaming allowing at least 50 Mb/s of throughput. Support for peer-to-peer, peer-to-multi-peer, and station-to-infrastructure protocols are in scope, as are infrastructure synchronization mechanisms. This amendment includes safeguards so that the high throughput data use cases do not cause significant disruption to low duty-cycle ranging use cases.