Statistical Analysis of the IEEE 802.15.4a UWB PHY over Multipath Channels

This paper shows the application of a recently proposed statistical characterization of the ultra-wideband (UWB) radio channel to the standardized IEEE 802.15.4a UWB physical layer (PHY). The statistical channel characterization yields the first and second-order moments of the autocorrelation function of the received UWB pulses, which can accurately express the intra-burst interference due to multipath propagation. The presented mathematical framework directly shows the influence of channel and system parameters, like bandwidth and delay spread, on the performance of a coherent receiver. The results show for a non-line-of-sight indoor channel, e.g. a reduction of the fading standard deviation from 1.3 to 0.8 dB when the bandwidth is increased from 0.5 to 1.3 GHz and a power loss of about 3 dB when the energy-accumlation interval is reduced from 50 to 10 ns.