A Comparative Analysis of Optimum and Suboptimum Rake Receivers in Impulsive UWB Environment

In this paper, the performance of rake receivers in the presence of fading and impulsive noise is addressed. The optimum maximum likelihood (ML) rake receiver for impulsive fading channel is derived, and a suboptimum rake receiver with a reduced complexity is obtained for practical purposes. Numerical results show that the suboptimum rake receiver exhibits almost the same performance as the optimum rake receiver. It is also observed that, as the number of fingers of a rake receiver increases, the performance of the rake receiver designed for impulsive environment improves, while the rake receiver optimized for Gaussian environment experiences performance degradation in an impulsive environment