Diversity-Based Sampling Rate Reduction for Digital UWB Communications

Digital signal processing is a powerful tool which has been considered to propose solutions to important UWB problems, however, the most restraining factor in the development of digital UWB receivers is the limited sampling rate on the off-the-shelf analog to digital conversion circuits. In addition, it is well-known the high power consumption brought in by high sampling rate analog to digital conversion circuits, this undermines the low power consumption characteristic, which is one of the potential advantages of UWB technology. In this paper, we propose a sampling reduction technique based on the introduction of con-troled pulse transmission diversity, which although becomes a deterrent of achievable data rate, can be employed in situations where power consumption rather than high data rate is important. Our analytical and simulation results show the feasibility of the proposed technique for UWB communications.