N-tone sigma-delta UWB-OFDM transmitter and receiver

A new method for generating and detecting the UWB-OFDM signal using a modified sigma-delta modulator is proposed. Unlike narrowband OFDM, the UWB-OFDM spectrum can have gaps between subcarriers. The modified sigma-delta modulator, dubbed N-Tone sigma-delta, introduces N zeros at the frequencies in the quantization noise spectrum. These zeros match the locations of frequencies used by the OFDM system and the quantization noise spectrum fills the gaps in the spectrum of the UWB-OFDM signal. In fact this new structure could be used in other UWB systems anytime we have gaps in the spectrum of the transmitted signal. We describe both the transmitter and receiver structures for UWB-OFDM. We also study the spectrum of the underlying system.