**4. Summary and conclusions**

This chapter introduces a novel concept for impulsive interference management in low power, autonomous, IR-UWB networks. The concept enables concurrent transmissions at full power, while allowing each source to independently adapt its pulse rate (measured in pulses per second) to reduce the impact of pulse collisions at nearby receivers. The design is independent of a particular modulation scheme and can be applied to any IR-UWB physical layer. Beyond, it does not rely on any particular receiver technique and can work with a simple, low cost, non-coherent receiver.

The chapter formulates and evaluates the pulse rate allocation problem as a social rate optimisation problem with QoS constraints. It introduces a distributed algorithm implementation and analyses its performance via simulation. It has been analytically proven that the game ΓPRC fits the framework of ordinal potential games, and that the NE is unique. In all considered scenarios, simulation results have confirmed the existence of an equilibrium for the game and that the distributed PRC algorithm converges to it, provided that the pricing parameters have been appropriately chosen.

We can conclude that distributed Pulse Rate Control is an appropriate means for impulsive interference management and network throughput optimisation with QoS constraints in highly loaded IR-UWB networks with a common central receiver. In [16] the author extends the work presented here and investigates the applicability of distributed PRC as well as its combination with adaptive channel coding in peer-to-peer networks, i.e. with multiple uncoordinated receivers and without any hierarchical infrastructure. Moreover she investigates a low-complexity, heuristic, alternative algorithm to the one proposed in this chapter that is more suitable for embedded hardware implementations, as preferred in the design of sensor networks.
