Uwb Impulse Radio with Gated Treshold Compensated Ppm Receiver

General agreement has been reached recently, that the coherent optimum receivers known from the theory of conventional communication systems are not feasible to implement low-cost and robust UltraWideBand (UWB) Impulse Radio (IR) receivers, especially if they have to offer an extremely low power consumption. Instead, Energy Detector (ED)-based noncoherent receivers have to be used [1]. Unfortunately, the noise performance of the ED-based receivers is relatively poor compared to that of the coherent receivers, resulting in a low receiver sensitivity. This contribution shows that a 7.7 dB improvement in receiver sensitivity can be achieved by disabling the receiver outside the UWB pulse duration. The low duty cycle offers an important extra advantage, namely, it reduces the receiver power consumption.