Symbol synchronization in coded UWB systems using adaptive iterative detection

Ultra-wide band (UWB) communication systems are extremely power limited systems typically with wide bandwidth to spare. The most common UWB system found in the literature, the impulse radio, uses very narrow pulses as a way to expand the bandwidth of the information bearing signal. For this reason, such systems are very sensitive to instabilities in the clock circuits. Therefore, extremely stable clocks are required for proper operation. In this paper, we propose novel techniques to trade off the clock stability with baseband digital processing in a coded UWB system. By jointly tracking the jitter and decoding the code, using adaptive iterative detection, we show that the specification on the clocks can be relaxed by orders of magnitude without significantly degrading the performance.