An algorithm for estimating signal-to-noise ratio of UWB signals

Recently, ultra wide-band (UWB) wireless communication technology, which provides high data transmission rates and is capable of linearly trading off between throughput and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), has drawn much attention for short-range wireless networks. To fully exploit its desirable features and to minimize its interference with coexisting other systems requires knowledge of the SNRs at the receivers. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for estimating the pulse energy-to-noise ratio of an UWB signal through utilization of output samples from a correlator in the receiver and evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm through computer simulation. A notable feature of the proposed algorithm is that it does not affect the effective throughput because the estimation process does not require any additional specific training signals.