Impact of Chip Duty Factor in DS-UWB Systems over Indoor Multipath Environment

This paper investigates the impact of chip duty factor (DF) in DS-UWB system with Rake receiver over AWGN and UWB indoor multipath environment corresponding to system parameters such as spreading bandwidth and chip length. Manipulating DF in DS-UWB system offers several advantages over multipath channel and thus, capable of improving system performance for better quality of communication. Although employing lower DF generally improves performance, in some exceptional cases on the other hand, degradation can be observed despite decreasing DF. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to clarify the relationship between DF and DS-UWB system performance. We discovered that with constant processing gain and spreading bandwidth, performance improvement can be observed at DF lower than 0.17. Additionally, with spreading bandwidth as tradeoff parameter, significant performance improvement can only be observed below DF of 0.85. key words: chip duty factor, DS-UWB, UWB indoor multipath channel, bit error rate (BER), spreading bandwidth