RAKE receiver design for TH-PPM UWB systems

This paper evaluates different multipath selection techniques for RAKE receiver application in ultra wideband (UWB) systems based on time-hopped pulse position modulation (TH-PPM). Three multipath selection criteria were investigated; namely path energy, path peak to average power ratio (PAPR), and the path cross-correlation. Different multi-path rich channel scenarios were examined under uniform and exponential power delay profiles. The results indicate that the PAPR based system has better performance especially in channels with exponential PDP. The PAPR RAKE performance in the exponential PDP channels with many independent clusters of multipath components is close to the performance of ALL-RAKE. Finally, a qualitative demonstration of the use of the proposed techniques for image transmission is presented.