Robust noncoherent receiver exploiting UWB channel properties

Most UWB radio receivers discussed in the literature are coherent receivers, which can offer high signal sensitivity and support high data rates but require precise timing clock recovery and complex rake structures. For UWB radio systems requiring only lower data throughput, noncoherent receiver architectures offer a good performance-complexity tradeoff. In this paper, we describe a noncoherent receiver for 2PPM UWB signals. The key design parameter, the duration of signal integration, can be chosen such that a target BER is achieved for each element of a preselected set of channel realizations. Although the proposed receiver works without channel state information and complex rake frontend, its performance compares favorably with that of a coherent 2PAM rake receiver of low order. The simple noncoherent receiver exploits most of the multipath diversity offered by the channel and is robust to clock timing errors.