On the performance of ultra-wide-band signals in Gaussian noise and dense multipath

An ultra-wide-band (UWB) signal is characterized by a radiated spectrum with a very wide bandwidth around a relatively low center frequency. In this paper, we study the reduced fading margin property of UWB signals. To evaluate the fading margin, we compare the performance of UWB signals in an environment with only additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) versus the performance of UWB signals in a dense multipath environment with AWGN. The assumption here is that the presence of multipath causes a small increase in the signal-to-noise ratio required to achieve reasonable levels of bit error rate. A numerical example confirms this assumption. More specifically, the example shows that to achieve a bit error rate equal to 10 , we require about 13.5 dB in the AWGN case and about 15 dB in the multipath case, resulting in a fading margin of just 1.5 dB. This small fading margin can be understood by the ability of the UWB signal to resolve the dense multipath.