Performance Study of A Near-Optimum Modulation Diversity Assisted Ultra-Wideband Receiver

A novel modulation diversity assisted (MDA) ultra-wideband (UWB) communication system was recently proposed. In this scheme, pulse position modulation and pulse amplitude modulation are applied to successive transmitted pulses alternately. The resulting modulation diversity helps to overcome channel estimation difficulties in typical UWB channels and permits low complexity receiver design. This paper considers a near-optimum receiver for MDA-UWB systems and studies its performance. A maximum likelihood (ML) estimator is also derived as a performance benchmark. Although the proposed receiver has a very simple structure, its performance approaches that of the ML receiver as signal-to-noise ratio increases. Our theoretical analysis is verified by computer simulations