Sparse Impulse Noise Minimization in UWB Communication using Signal Characteristics

In many applications, ultra-wide band (UWB) system experiences impulse noise due to surrounding physical noise sources. Therefore, a conventional receiver (correlator or matched filter) designed for additive Gaussian noise system is not optimum for an impulse noise affected communication channel. In this paper, we propose a new robust receiver design that utilizes the received UWB signal cluster sparsity to mitigate impulse noise. Further, multipath channel diversity enhances the signal-to-noise ratio, as compared to the single path after impulse noise removal in the proposed receiver design. The proposed receiver is analyzed in time hopping binary phase shift keying UWB system and is compared with popular blanking non-linearity based receiver in Bernoulli-Gaussian impulse noise over both single and multipath IEEE 802.15.4a channels. Unlike existing designs, the proposed receiver does not require any training sequence. The proposed receiver is observed to be robust with improved bit error rate performance as compared to a blanking receiver in the presence of impulse noise.