<p>As the interest in intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI) increases, so does the need of a suitable antenna which endures those demanding conditions. The ultrawideband (UWB) technology provides an elegant way of generating high-voltage UWB pulses which can be used for IEMI. One UWB antenna, invented solely for the purpose of radiating pulses, is the impulse radiating antenna (IRA). In the course of this master thesis work, a suitable geometry of the IRA is suggested, and modelled, for the high-voltage application of 90 kV.</p>

As the interest in intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI) increases, so does the need of a suitable antenna which endures those demanding conditions. The ultrawideband (UWB) technology provides an elegant way of generating high-voltage UWB pulses which can be used for IEMI. One UWB antenna, invented solely for the purpose of radiating pulses, is the impulse radiating antenna (IRA). In the course of this master thesis work, a suitable geometry of the IRA is suggested, and modelled, for the high-voltage application of 90 kV.

Emerging Ultra Wideband (UWB) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems hold the promise of delivering wireless data at high speeds, exceeding hundreds of megabits per second over typical distances of 10 meters or less. The purpose of this Thesis is to estimate the timing accuracies required with such systems in order to achieve Bit Error Rates (BER) of the order of magnitude of 10-12 and thereby avoid overloading the correction of irreducible errors due to misaligned timing errors to a small absolute number of bits in error in real-time relative to a data rate of hundreds of megabits per second. Our research approach involves managing bit error rates through identifying maximum timing synchronization errors. Thus, it became our research goal to determine the timing accuracies required to avoid operation of communication systems within the asymptotic region of BER flaring at low BERs in the resultant BER curves. We propose pushing physical layer bit error rates to below 10-12 before using forward error correction (FEC) codes. This way, the maximum reserve is maintained for the FEC hardware to correct for burst as well as recurring bit errors due to corrupt bits caused by other than timing synchronization errors.

This dissertation applies theories and concepts of wireless communications and signal processing to the security domain to assess the security of a Wireless secret Key Generation (WKG) system against capable eavesdroppers, who employ all the feasible tools to compromise the system’s security. The security of WKG is evaluated via real wireless measurements, where adversary knows and applies appropriate signal processing tools in ordere to predict the generated key with the communicating pair. It is shown that in a broadband stationary wireless communication channel, (e.g. commercial off-the-shelf 802.11 WLAN devices), a capable eavesdropper can recover a large portion of the secret key bits. However, in an Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication, at the same stationary environment, secret key rates of 128 bits per channel probe are achievable. / Graduate