Impact of the Number of Fingers of a Selective Rake Receiver for Uwb Systems in Modified Saleh-valenzuela Channel

The study for this paper focuses on searching the optimal number of fingers to be used by a Selective-Rake receiver using different ultra wideband systems. The presence of multipath fading has been taken into account using a modified Saleh-Valenzuela model. Coherent and non-coherent detection has been performed within different combining approaches. Non-coherent techniques have been implemented with and without power estimation. Results show that in non-coherent systems the optimal number of fingers Dopt required for the detection is lower than for coherent ones. On the other side, an increase of signal-to-noise ratio causes Dopt to get higher, which is the same trend noticed while passing from a line-of-sight (LOS) channel to a nonLOS one.