A novel multi-antenna impulse radio UWB transceiver for broadband high-throughput 4G WLANs

In the last years, a lot of attention has been devoted to both multi-antenna systems with space-time orthogonal block coding (STOBC) and ultra wideband (UWB) transceivers based on impulse-radio (IR) technologies. In this short contribution we anticipate the architecture of a novel transceiver merging both multi-antenna and pulse position modulation (PPM) IR-UWB techniques and then we test the performance in flat-faded application scenarios typical of emerging broadband 4G WLANs. Three main appealing features are retained by the sketched transceiver scheme. First, it allows to equip the UWB receiver with reliable estimates of the (possibly time-varying) underlying multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) UWB without reducing the overall information throughput conveyed by the system. Second, the performance confirms that the proposed transceiver is able to achieve "full diversity" even at SNRs as low as 1.5-2 dB. As a consequence, the resulting BERs outperform those of current Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) IR-UWB transceivers over two orders of magnitude even at SNR's as low as 3-4 dB. Third, at target BER's below 10/sup -2/ and radiated powers around 250 μW, the coverage ranges allowed by the proposed MIMO IR-UWB scheme typically outperform those of conventional SISO IR-UWB ones of about two orders of magnitude.