One-bit time reversal using binary pulse sequence for indoor communications

Time reversal (TiR) is a pre-filtering technique that exploits the propagation channel state information in order to reduce the complexity of a user’s terminal in a communication system. TiR transfers the system complexity to the base station and has been proposed for ultra wideband (UWB) communications in highly dispersive multipath environments. In TiR-UWB two complex tasks must be carried out by the base station. The first is the estimation of the channel state information of the user’s terminal, and the second is the generation of the time reversed channel signal. In this paper, the use of a correlation receiver for the estimation of themultipath components (MPCs) of the propagation channel is proposed. Then, a novel binary time reversal (BTiR) method that makes use of the resolvable MPCs to simplify the transceiver tasks is introduced. When using BTiR the communication system can be regarded as a direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) scheme in which the spreading chips are provided by the propagation channel. The performance of the proposed BTiR scheme is assessed by using measurements of UWB spatial channels in a typical indoor environment. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.