Non-Coherent UWB Communications

Non-coherent receivers have become promising candidates for low complexity and low power ultra wide band (UWB) systems.Wediscuss the performance of energy detection and differential detection in additive white Gaussian noise, Rayleigh fading, and multipath environments. It is shown that non-coherent receivers can easily collect the multipath energy by means of equal gain combing. The loss (compared to quite hypothetical coherent channel matched filter detection) which is introduced by this suboptimal combining technique is tolerable, if the receiver utilizes a filter matched to the transmitted waveform. A system concept for low data rate communications based on frequency hopping and complete digital baseband processing is also presented. Index Terms – low data rate, UWB, non-coherent, small scale fading, matched filter, analog-to-digital converter, frequency hopping, differential OFDM