Method for Bandwidth Efficiency Increasing of M-ary PPM Transmitted-Reference UWB Communication Systems

One of the main drawbacks of conventional transmitted reference (TR) ultra-wideband systems is the fact that time delay between the reference and the data pulse has to be at least equal to channel delay spread, in order to avoid inter-pulse interference (IPI). This requirement drastically limits the achievable data rate of conventional TR systems based on M-ary pulse position modulation (PPM). In this paper, the new method for M-ary TR PPM scheme bandwidth efficiency increasing is proposed. In the proposed method the orthogonal codes are used such that only the pulses which can cause IPI are coded. Usage of such type of coding allows the reduction of time delay between the reference and the data pulse, whereas IPI is avoided. The proposed method achieves higher bandwidth efficiency than the conventional TR PPM method for the similar BEP performance level. Furthermore, the results show that an additional increase in bandwidth efficiency can be achieved by using higher modulation levels. Additionally, the analysis on tradeoffs between the BEP performance, bandwidth reduction and system costs is given in this paper.