Channel estimation for time-hopping pulse position modulation ultra-wideband communication systems

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems are used in indoor environments with dense multi-path characteristics. Therefore channel estimation has an important role in the receiver of these systems. A new approach for data-aided (DA) and non-data-aided (NDA) channel estimation is proposed, which is called the pulse compression (PC) method. This method is useful for UWB systems employing time-hopping pulse position modulation. The PC method requires only some basic operations such as sampling, overlap-add and finite impulse response filtering. The PC method, in both DA and NDA scenarios, in spite of its low complexity, outperforms the maximum-likelihood (ML) method in channel parameters estimation. The bit error rate (BER) of the DA method, in single-user scenario, performs as well as the ML method, and in multi-user scenario, in the worst case, there is only 0.5 dB loss compared with the ML method. In the case of NDA scenario, the proposed method outperforms the NDA-ML method, that is, in the single-user scenario about 4 dB gain at the BER of 10^-3 is observed. In multi-user scenario, it outperforms significantly the NDA-ML method, and its performance loss in comparison with the perfect channel knowledge scenario is about 3 dB at the BER of 10^-3.