BER performance and spectral properties of interleaved convolutional time hopping for UWB impulse radio

Interleaved convolutional time hopping (ICTH) is a recently proposed coding/modulation scheme for UWB impulse radio. ICTH is based upon a low-rate convolutional code, with optimized distance properties, combined with multilevel pulse-position modulation (PPM). In this context, bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) is used to decorrelate the bit errors and, more importantly, to obtain a flat spectrum. We present analytical bounds for the BER (bit-error-rate) performance of ICTH and an analysis of its spectral properties.