Digital Receiver Design for Transmitted Reference Ultra-Wideband Systems

A complete detection, channel estimation, synchronization, and equalization scheme for a transmitted reference (TR) ultra-wideband (UWB) system is proposed in this paper. The scheme is based on a data model which admits a moderate data rate and takes both the interframe interference (IFI) and the intersymbol interference (ISI) into consideration. Moreover, the bias caused by the interpulse interference (IPI) in one frame is also taken into account. Based on the analysis of the stochastic properties of the received signals, several detectors are studied and evaluated. Furthermore, a data-aided two-stage synchronization strategy is proposed, which obtains sample-level timing in the range of one symbol at the first stage and then pursues symbol-level synchronization by looking for the header at the second stage. Three channel estimators are derived to achieve joint channel and timing estimates for the first stage, namely, the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) estimator, the least squares (LS) estimator, and the matched filter (MF). We check the performance of different combinations of channel estimation and equalization schemes and try to find the best combination, that is, the one providing a good tradeoff between complexity and performance.