Design and performance evaluation of transmitted reference Ultra Wideband Receiver

Abstract

Wireless communication is one of the fast evolving areas in communication field today. It is one of the most important technologies in modern society. Ultra Wideband (UWB) radio is among the most recently developed technologies for wireless communications, and gains strong attention in both academia and industries in the world these days. As the number of portable devices grows, it is very easy to see how a short-range wireless network could ease the life of a user by removing some or all of these wires. The high data rates are perhaps the most compelling aspect from a user’s point of view and also from a commercial manufacturer’s position. The extremely large bandwidth occupied by UWB gives this potential since the ITU has allocated frequency band for UWB from 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz. In case of UWB the design of a reception scheme is a key issue, the rake receiver might require tens or even hundreds of fingers in some cases to capture the available energy but in the case of UWB, traditional rake may not work and even if it works with some modification. An alternate approach is based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) techniques where a large number of sub-bands are used. This might be a good solution but is not an inexpensive solution either. Another approach, namely transmitted reference (TR), initially proposed for spread spectrum communication has regained popularity. The TR schemes used along with correlation-based receivers are more popularly known, as a suboptimal receiver does not require channel estimation. Because of the cost issues and complexity issues suboptimal reception schemes have become very popular.