Rake Reception of UWB-IR Indoor Radio with Reflector

Ultra-wideband impulse-radio systems have the ability to resolve multiple paths of the transmit radio and to mitigate the fading. Rake reception is capable of combining these paths, thereby improving the signal-to-noise ratio. In LOS channel, however, the improvement may be comparatively small for the cost of increasing receiver system complexity. This is because the LOS path should be dominant for the total energy in all paths. In this paper the distribution of the energy captured by Rake receiver is first presented for 160 measured LOS channel cases and then discussed. Rake reception with reflector is next suggested in order to effectively increase the signal energy without increasing the complexity, that is, increased number of Rake fingers. The use of reflector is also suggested for non-LOS channel and experimentally discussed where the Rake gain is compared with conventional Rake without reflector. The measurement results show the usefulness.