Direct sequence spreading UWB systems: frequency domain processing for enhanced performance and throughput

In this work, we propose an innovative high performance, high throughput direct sequence spreading (DSS) ultra wideband (UWB) system. Our proposed system employs a novel multi-carrier pulse waveform at the UWB transmit side: At the receiver side, the received DSS UWB pulse is decomposed into its subcarriers and recombined to (1) exploit diversity in the frequency domain and (2) provide resistance to inter symbol interference (ISI) and/or multi-access interference (MAI). As a direct result, the proposed frequency-based UWB DSS system is shown to significantly outperform time-based DSS UWB systems, offering significant gain in throughput (up to 32 fold) without performance degradation, or, alternatively, avoiding error floors due to MAI that limit the performance of time-based systems.