Performance analysis of RC-SRake receiver in ultra-wideband communication under IEEE 802.15.4a channel

In ultra-wideband impulse radio (UWB-IR) system, Rake receiver can take advantage of the high degree of diversity that results from a large number of multipath components (MPCs). In this paper, we propose a reduced-complexity selective Rake (RC-SRake) receiver scheme under ultra-wideband multipath channels. It employs a convolution based finger estimation algorithm, which has minimal complexity that does not require precise channel information. We derive a closed-form expression for symbol error probability (SEP) of the proposed Rake receiver in term of the combined fingers and impulse noise. We evaluate these expressions numerically under various IEEE 802.15.4a channel models. It is observed that a similar ability of energy capture can be obtained with less than 10 fingers as compared to the ideal SRake. More importantly, as the number of combined fingers increases, the performance of our RC-SRake receiver improves in general despite occasional degradation due to the estimation error of impulse noise.