Multiple Access Performance of Balanced UWB Transmitted-Reference Systems in Multipath

Recently, a novel balanced transmitted-reference (TR) system has been proposed for UWB communications. This TR system is capable of properly eliminating the inter-pulse interference (IPI) between the reference and data pulses in a single user multipath environment. In this paper, we investigate its multiple access (MA) performance by evaluating the second- order moments of noise and interference terms. The analytical framework developed here can also be used to accurately evaluate the MA performance of conventional TR system. It is shown that the proposed balanced TR system can achieve comparable MA capacity as conventional TR, while operating at higher information rate. On the other hand, given a target information rate, the balanced TR system in conjunction with M-ary signaling offers higher MA capacity than conventional TR system. The performance results suggest there exists a trade-off between the inter-pulse distance, thus the achievable information rate, and the MA capacity.