BER Performance of an Ultra-Wideband Impulse Radio Correlator Receiver

This paper studies the characteristics of an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) communication system employing Impulse Radio techniques and, specifically, the effects of the matched filter of a correlator receiver in the performance of such a system. Such effects are evaluated in terms of the Bit Error Rate (BER) for a Binary Pulse Position Modulation (BPPM) scheme, in an indoor multipath propagation channel and in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The case of imperfect channel estimation is taken into account, while comparisons with perfect channel estimation are performed. The dependence of BER on parameters such as the signal to noise ratio (SNR), the number of estimation pilot pulses and correletor taps, is finally derived. It is shown that there is an optimum number of correlator taps for best BER performance depending on the channel estimation procedure. Key-Words: Ultra-wideband, Impulse Radio, correlator, BER