Self-Reference Ultra-Wideband Systems

In practical Ultra-Wideband (UWB) systems, Rake receivers are not able to fully take advantage of all resolvable paths, because of the required computational and power resources. On the other hand, Transmitted Reference (TR) schemes are simple, robust structures with low power consumption and they do not require channel estimation, but they sustain a 3dB energy/rate loss, as each symbol requires the transmission of two pulses. Alternatively, the Differential TR (DTR) scheme offers 3dB performance gain compared to conventional TR structures and double data rates since the previously transmitted data pulse is used as a reference. In this paper we introduce a less complex, energy-efficient TR scheme, called Self Reference (SR) UWB system, which uses as reference an elaborated replica of the received signal. It is shown that the SR scheme outperforms the DTR one in terms of error performance and achieves double data-rate compared to conventional TR schemes.