Pulse Distortion Caused by Cylinder Diffraction and Its Impact on UWB Communications

One of the characteristics of UWB signals is pulse distortion, inherently determined by its huge bandwidth. Using cylinder model as an example, pulse distortion and its impacts on UWB system performance have been investigated. Although a lot of papers addressed the pulse distortion issue, quantifying the impacts of pulse distortion on the system performance appears to be novel. The simulation result shows that a SNR loss caused by template mismatch could reach as high as 4 dB. It is also found that the range error caused by pulse distortion is much larger than the Cramer Rao lower bound (CRLB) and thus another source of errors fundamentally limiting the accuracies of time of arrivals (TOA) of a received signal. These results have direct applications in timing synchronization and positioning