UWB

showstack / protocols / uwb

Also called Ultra-wideband, IEEE 802.15.4z.

A radio that is poor at carrying data and superb at measuring distance. Very short pulses across a wide band give a precise time of arrival, and time of arrival is range — which makes it the basis of most centimetre-class performer and object tracking.

Tracking and positionPaid specIEEEReported

Control Small, urgent, must arrive

Small messages that either repeat constantly or fire once. Bandwidth is almost never the problem.

What kills it. Latency and loss on the messages that fire once. A repeating level survives a dropped packet; a GO does not.

The four flows, and why the model is worth having →

What goes wrong

Anchors have to be surveyed, and the tracking is only as correct as that survey.

Metal and dense structure produce reflections; a position built from a reflected path looks like a valid position.

A tag behind a body loses line of sight, which is why systems fuse it with an inertial sensor.

Typical use

Performer and prop tracking feeding lighting and object audio, usually output as PSN or RTTrPM.
Precise indoor positioning where GNSS cannot reach.

Sources

IEEE 802.15.4z — IEEE primary

Understand the mechanism

How it all runs together How a machine reads the world

Something wrong, or missing?

Known gaps on this entry: default_ports, implementations. If you can source one of them, that is a ten minute pull request.

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