Phase compensation communication technique against time reversal for ultra-wideband channels

Phase compensation (PC) prefiltering is experimentally investigated for multipath channels over the frequency band spanning 2–12 GHz, a topic which to the best of the authors knowledge has not been studied in the literature on ultrawideband (UWB) communications. The authors emphasis is to assess the capabilities of PC compared to time reversal (TR) prefilters over indoor UWB channels regarding multipath suppression, channel hardening, noise sensitivity and high-speed data transmission. Experiments were carried out for PC and TR prefilters in both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) environments. The multipath compression effectiveness is characterised by computing the root-mean-square delay spread and peak-to-average power ratio for actual measured channels and for the IEEE 802.15.4(a) UWB model. The authors study suggests PC outperforms TR considerably in mitigating the multipath channel dispersion. Bit-error-rate (BER) curves have been simulated for data rates in the range of 125–4000 Mbps based on the measured channel responses. The BER simulations suggest that while the TR performance is prohibitively saturated by its residual intersymbol interference for data rates of 500 Mbps and above (especially in NLOS), PC can be used for high-speed data transmissions as fast as 2 Gbps in both LOS and NLOS environments.