The recent opening of the 6 GHz band has raised major concerns in the ultra-wideband (UWB) community, as Wi-Fi 6E devices are now allowed to operate in the same spectrum. Co-located Wi-Fi 6E devices represent indeed a major threat for UWB-based systems, as the latter not only share the same spectrum, but also operate at a significantly lower power than Wi-Fi devices.
Our research group was the first to confirm experimentally that both the communication and the ranging performance of UWB systems degrades severely in presence of Wi-Fi 6E traffic. As a next step, we would like to systematically benchmark and quantitatively compare the performance of different UWB platforms (e.g., the old-generation Decawave DW1000, as well as the new-generation Qorvo DW3000 and NXP Trimension) to shed light on their resilience to cross-technology interference. To this end, we have deployed a large-scale testbed at our institute with more than 50 UWB nodes and several Wi-Fi\,6E devices across a hallway and an office.
Students can make use of this facility, which largely simplifies experimentation.