Robustness of a time-reversal ultra-wideband system in non-stationary channel environments

Time reversal (TR) is regarded as a potential future transmission scheme for ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems. However, the need for a perfect channel estimation is regarded as one of the main drawbacks of a TR system. It is assumed that in the case of a time-varying channel or imperfect channel estimation, the performance of the TR scheme degrades enormously. Based on this assumption, the time-reversal scheme is not considered suitable for such environments. Here, the robustness of a TR system in a time-varying channel environment is studied. The experiments are performed for a time-varying channel environment for fixed terminals and for a displaced terminal with a stationary channel environment. The results show that if the channel maintains some partial correlation with the previous channel, the TR system can perform robustly.