Differentially-Encoded Di-Symbol Time-Division Multiuser Impulse Radio in UWB Channel

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems are expected to operate in a highly frequency-selective multipath fading environment. To exploit multipath diversity gains in a multiuser scenario, we developed a differentially-encoded, di-symbol time-division multiuser impulse radio (d²TD-IR) system with delay-sum autocorrelation receivers. In traditional time-division multiple access systems, each user transmits a single pulse during a symbol duration in a pre-assigned chip which is longer than maximum excess delay of the channel. However, due to the exponential decay property of UWB channel, we proposed the use of much shorter chip duration, which significantly increases the transmission rate. Because dense pulse transmission will induce multiuser interference, two time-hopping access sequences, which alternately encode the odd- and even-index symbols, are employed with delay-sum autocorrelation receivers to maximally suppress the interference. It was shown that when the chip duration is properly chosen, the proposed system outperforms the conventional time-hopping impulse radio system at high signal-to-noise ratio. This paper also proposed a method to estimate the optimal chip duration when only the average power decay profile of the UWB channel is known.