Using UWB Gaussian pulses for inter-vehicle communications

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is a candidate technology for future wireless communications. It uses very short pulses, so that the spectrum of the emitted signals may spread over several GHz. An inter-vehicle communication system based on UWB technology is studied. Two waveforms are compared: Gaussian and monocycle pulses. A 2 GHz pulse generator is associated with an antipodal (AP) modulator in the first case and with a binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulator in the second case. The numerical receiver and the detection algorithm are described. The performance of the matched filter receiver is evaluated in the case of multipath propagation with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). The European Telecommunication Systems Institute (ETSI) rural area (RA) channel has also been considered. The bit error rate (BER) values are calculated for the two UWB waveforms and the time jitter problem is also addressed. It is shown that the AP-coded Gaussian pulses waveform is the best signalling waveform among those studied here, with the supplementary advantages of a very low sensitivity to multipath effects and to jitter, together with much lower error rates.