On the achievable rates of ultra-wideband PPM with non-coherent detection in multipath environments

In this work we investigate the achievable rates of ultra-wideband (UWB) systems using a m-ary pulse position modulation (PPM) with non-coherent receivers in multipath fading environments. We derive a random coding bound on the achievable information rates and highlight the influence of system parameters (bandwidth, delay spread). We also investigate the effect of the use of hard decisions prior to channel decoding and characterize its impact on system performance.