Low-complexity multiuser detection and reduced-rank Wiener filters for ultra-wideband multiple access

Realizing the large user capacity planned for ultra-wideband (UWB) systems motivates multiuser detection (MUD). However, it is impractical to implement conventional chip-rate MUD methods, because UWB signaling gives rise to high detection complexity and difficulty in capturing energy scattered by dense multipath. In this paper, we develop a reception model for UWB multiple access based on frame-rate sampled signals in lieu of chip-rate samples. This model enables low-complexity MUD, of which we examine a reduced-rank Wiener filter for blind symbol detection. We show that frame-rate UWB samples have a small number of distinct eigenvalues in the data covariance matrix, resulting in warp convergence of reduced-rank filtering. The proposed MUD method exhibits good performance at low complexity, even in the presence of strong frequency-selective multipath fading.