Weighted noncoherent receivers for UWB PPM signals

Noncoherent receivers are attractive for pulsed UWB systems due to the implementation simplicity. To alleviate the noise effect in detecting UWB PPM signals, this letter proposes a simple yet flexible weighted noncoherent receiver structure, which adopts a square-law integrator multiplied with a window function. The integrator outputs captured within different integration time windows are weighted and linear combined to generate decision statistic, in which smaller weights are imposed on outputs having larger noise contributions. Optimal and suboptimal weighting coefficients are derived to maximize the detection BER. Both analysis and simulations verify the effectiveness of weighted processing in reducing the noise level in noncoherent reception.