Energy-Detection UWB Receivers with Multiple Energy Measurements

This paper deals with a novel energy-detection receiver for ultra-wideband systems operating in dense multi-path environments. For binary PPM modulation we propose a detection scheme that operates on signal energy measurements taken on small fractions (bins) of the symbol period. Assuming that the fractional energies of the channel response over those bins can be estimated in some way, we look for the decision strategy that minimizes the error probability. This leads us to a receiver structure that generalizes the conventional energy- detection scheme. The new strategy turns out to be superior to the conventional strategy and its performance is found to improve as the bin size decreases. A simple method is proposed to estimate the fractional energies of the channel response exploiting a training sequence. The impact of the estimation errors on the receiver performance is shown to be marginal.