Gaussian pulse in Ultra-Wide Band communications

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology has been gaining increasing interest from the industry due to its recent application in communications. The technology itself has been well known for decades and its use was mostly reduced to radars in industrial applications. During the standardization process which is not over yet, two realizations were proposed – Impulse Radio (IR), which has been known for years and is synonymus with the UWB technology, and the recently unveiled UWB technology with OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) modulation. We will focus on IR-UWB, which utilizes the pulses of duration in the order of nanoseconds yielding enormous bandwidth. UWB devices operate at limited power in an unlicensed spectrum. The efficiency of the system depends on the pulse shape. Since the optimal shape is not known, many pulse optimization methods have already been proposed. Gaussian pulse is one of the fundamental pulse shapes, therefore we made an analysis of the UWB system performance when using derivatives of Gaussian pulse. The capacity of the system depends on the order of the derivative, so the latter was percieved as the rule guideline evaluating the system performance.