Stop-and-Go Receivers for Non-Coherent Impulse Communications

Novel non-coherent impulse communications receivers are proposed to alleviate excessive noise collection in clustered multipath channels. To this aim, a stop-and-go strategy based on energy detection in the autocorrelation receiver or in the energy detection receiver is employed. This strategy enables the selective collection of useful signal portions only, allowing the integration interval to be kept large without noise penalty. To implement this strategy, a blind method is employed, using model order selection based on information theoretic criteria, which optimizes the performance of the proposed receiver and does not require the estimation of channel parameters. The bit error probability of the proposed stop-and-go receivers is evaluated, and our results highlight the considerable performance gain at the expense of a small increase in complexity.