Equalization for DS-UWB Systems—Part I: BPSK Modulation

Ultra-wideband wireless transmission has attracted considerable attention both in academia and industry. For high-rate and short-range transmission, direct sequence based ultra-wideband (DS-UWB) systems are a strong contender for consumer market applications. Due to the large transmission bandwidth, the UWB channel is characterized by a long root-mean-square delay spread and the RAKE receiver cannot always overcome the resulting intersymbol interference. We therefore study equalization for DS-UWB systems. This paper is comprised of two parts. In this first part, we consider DS-UWB with binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) modulation, which is the mandatory transmission mode for DS-UWB systems promoted by the UWB Forum industry alliance. We derive matched filter bounds for optimum equalization taking into account practical constraints like receiver filtering, sampling, and the number of RAKE fingers when RAKE preprocessing is applied at the receiver. Our results show that chip-rate sampling is sufficient for close-to-optimum performance. For analysis of suboptimum equalization strategies we further study the distribution of the zeros of the channel transfer function including RAKE combining. Our findings suggest that linear equalization is well suited for the lower data rate modes of DS-UWB systems, whereas nonlinear equalization is preferable for high-data rate modes. Moreover, we devise equalization schemes with widely linear processing, which improve performance while not increasing equalizer complexity. Simulation and numerical results confirm the significance of our analysis and equalizer designs and show that low-complexity (widely) linear and nonlinear equalizers perform close to the pertinent matched filter bound limit.