Blind Integration Time Determination for UWB Transmitted Reference Receivers

Transmitted-reference (TR) modulation schemes have generated interest in the context of ultrawide bandwidth (UWB) communications in order to avoid complex channel estimation and synchronization. In these schemes, the length of the integration interval must be carefully chosen to achieve optimal performance. Difficulties arise since this parameter is related to the channel characteristics and to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we propose a blind method for the integration time determination, that adopts a model order selection strategy based on information theoretic criteria (ITC). Observing the received signal, without a-priori information about the channel and the SNR, the proposed technique finds an integration time closer to the channel ensemble optimum integration time, i.e., the integration time obtained a-posteriori for the considered channel model as the value that minimizes the average bit error probability (BEP) of the TR scheme for each SNR.