Performance of DS-UWB multiple-access systems with diversity reception in dense multipath environments

Ultrawideband (UWB) technology is characterized by transmitting extremely short duration radio impulses. To improve its multiple-access capability, the UWB technology can be combined with traditional spread-spectrum techniques. This paper demonstrates the influence of spatial and temporal diversities on the performance of direct-sequence (DS) UWB multiple-access systems in dense multipath environments. Numerical results show that the bit error rate performance of the DS-UWB system can be improved significantly by increasing the number of antenna array elements and/or by adding more multipaths coherently at the receiver. Furthermore, this paper studies the impact of array geometry on system performance and shows that a rectangular array can capture more energy and thus can offer better performance than a uniform linear array