Performance evaluation of impulse radio UWB systems with pulse-based polarity randomization

In this paper, the performance of a binary phase shift keyed random time-hopping impulse radio system with pulse-based polarity randomization is analyzed. The effects of interframe interference and multiple-access interference on the performance of a generic Rake receiver are investigated for asynchronous systems in frequency-selective environments. A key step is to model the asynchronous system as a chip-synchronous system with uniformly distributed timing jitter for the transmitted pulses of interfering users. This model allows the analytical technique developed for the synchronous case to be extended to the asynchronous case and allows the derivation of closed-form equations for the bit error probability in various Rake receiver architectures. It is shown that a Gaussian approximation can be used for both multiple-access and interframe interference as long as the number of frames per symbols is large (typically, at least 5), whereas there is no minimum requirement for the number of users for the equations to hold. It is observed that under many circumstances, the chip-synchronous case shows a worse bit error probability performance than the asynchronous case; the amount of the difference depends on the autocorrelation function of the ultra-wideband pulse and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio of the system. Simulations studies support the approximate analysis.