Performance enhancement of kurtosis detector using time reversal technique

Noncoherent receivers are the practical solutions for impulse radio (IR) ultra-wideband (UWB) systems due to their low-complexity and low-cost implementation. However, this simplicity is achieved at the expense of some performance degradation. In this paper, we propose the utilization of time reversal (TR) technique to improve the performance of a recently presented noncoherent detection scheme, called kurtosis detector (KD). We investigate the effects of channel delay spread and integration interval on the performance of KD and TR-KD. Comparisons are also made with the performance of energy detector (ED) in the conventional and time reversed (TR-ED) schemes. The simulation results show that TR-KD outperforms KD in both short and long integration intervals, and the sensitivity to the optimum integration time is greatly reduced in TR-KD compared to the other receivers mentioned above.