Narrowband Interference Mitigation for Differential UWB Systems

Autocorrelation receiver (AcR) front-ends promise to provide a low-complexity, sub-optimal alternative to coherent reception for differentially modulated impulse radio (IR) ultra-wideband (UWB) signals (transmitted-reference (TR) systems). Due to the high processing gain of UWB-IR signals, these are normally quite robust against narrowband interference (NBI). Much of this robustness is unfortunately lost when the coherent receiver front-end is replaced by an AcR. In this paper, a data model for the NBI is derived for the non-linear AcR. Under conditions imposed by parameters of the UWB signal and parameters of the NBI signal, the data model will have the structure of a memoryless multi-input multi-output channel, which can be exploited in detection and NBI mitigation schemes. Performance results indicate that even a conventional threshold detector benefits from these signal properties, if the UWB signal is designed accordingly