Experimental evaluation of RAKE receiver performance in a line-of-sight ultra-wideband channel

This paper assesses the utility of signal processing techniques for multipath mitigation in an ultra-wideband (UWB) indoor radio channel. UWB systems have the ability to resolve rapidly arriving multipaths. RAKE receivers can provide multipath diversity and integrate the energy from various multipaths, helping overcome fading and effectively increasing the received power. We report experimental studies of multipath propagation in an indoor UWB environment, based on which we predict the performance of RAKE receivers with a variety of configurations and find that incremental gain is high only for low order RAKEs.