UWB system based on energy detection of derivatives of the Gaussian pulse

A new method for energy detection ultra-wideband systems is proposed. The transmitter of this method uses two pulses that are different-order derivatives of the Gaussian pulse to transmit bit 0 or 1. These pulses are appropriately chosen to separate their spectra in the frequency domain. The receiver is composed of two energy-detection branches. Each branch has a filter which captures the signal energy of either bit 0 or 1. The outputs of the two branches are subtracted from each other to generate the decision statistic. The value of this decision statistic is compared to the threshold to determine the transmitted bit. This new method has the same bit error rate (BER) performance as energy detection-based pulse position modulation (PPM) in additive white Gaussian noise channels. In multipath channels, its performance surpasses PPM and it also exhibits better BER performance in the presence of synchronization errors.