Design and analysis of robust detectors for TH IR-UWB systems with multiuser interference

In this letter, we design and analyze the performance of single-user-type non-linear detectors that are able to cope with the impulsive nature of multiuser interference (MUI) in timehopping impulse-radio ultra-wideband (TH IR-UWB) systems. We collectively refer to these detectors as "robust" detectors. We first propose two novel detectors and then derive semi-analytical expressions for the bit-error rate (BER) of TH IR-UWB with general robust detection. The evaluation of these expressions greatly facilitates the optimization of detector parameters and provides insight into the effects of MUI. A performance comparison shows that (1) robust detection significantly improves performance over conventional detection in the presence of MUI, (2) the parameters for various parametric robust detectors can be chosen to be constant over many transmission scenarios with only little performance degradation compared to using the optimal parameter value, and (3) the proposed two-term detector, which requires a modest amount of parameter estimation, achieves consistently the best performance.