RAKE receiver finger assignment for ultra-wideband radio

In this paper, finger estimation for RAKE reception in ultrawideband (UWB) radio is considered. The effects of pulse shaping and pulse position modulation (PPM) for the performance of finger estimation, and for the BER performance of the RAKE receiver are evaluated. New algorithms for finger assignment are developed. The proposed algorithms use different selection criteria for assigning the RAKE fingers. The performance of the proposed algorithms and new selection criteria are evaluated through computer simulations. Significant gains are observed compared to the conventional finger assignment algorithms.