Page "Ultra-wideband" Paragraph 7

One performance measure of a radio in applications such as communication, locating, tracking and radar is the channel capacity for a given bandwidth and signaling format.

Channel capacity is the theoretical maximum possible number of bits per second of information which may be conveyed through one or more links in an area.

According to the Shannon – Hartley theorem, the channel capacity of a properly-encoded signal is proportional to the bandwidth of the channel and the logarithm of the signal-to-noise ratio ( SNR ) ( assuming the noise is additive white Gaussian noise ).

Thus channel capacity increases linearly by increasing the channel's bandwidth to the maximum value available, or ( in a fixed-channel bandwidth ) by increasing the signal power exponentially.

By virtue of the large bandwidths inherent in UWB systems, large channel capacities could be achieved in principle ( given sufficient SNR ) without invoking higher-order modulations requiring a very high SNR.