Design and Analysis of Space-time Block and Trellis Coding Schemes for Single-Band UWB Communications Systems

Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) technology has recently attracted much research interest due to its appealing features in short-range mobile communications. These features include high-data rates, low power consumption, multiple-access communications and precise positioning capabilities. Space-Time Coding (STC) techniques, such as block coding and trellis coding, are known to be simple and practical ways to increase both the spectral efficiency and the capacity in wireless communications. The thesis aims at designing robust and efficient space-time coding schemes well adapted to single-band UWB signalling. Thus, this work incorporates a fine analysis of a standard Single Input Single Output (SISO) single-band UWB system, scrutinising every important aspect of this system including transceiver structure, channel modelling, multiple-access techniques and detection process. Research also leads to the derivation of a novel closed-form approximation for the average probability of bit-error for single-band UWB systems. This in-depth study highlights drawbacks inherent to UWB systems such as time-jitter effects or rake-receiver complexity and proposes schemes that benefit from spatial diversity to mitigate these problems. Thus, the thesis concentrates on the design of new multiple-antenna space-time coding systems