Performance Evaluation of UWB Systems Exploiting Orthonormal Pulses

The novel pulses, which not only meet the power spectral mask of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) but also preserve orthonormality at the correlation receiver, have been proposed by Kim for high data rate communications in indoor ultra-wideband (UWB) systems. The proposed multiple orthonormal pulses comply with the FCC spectral mask without additional frequency shifting or bandpass filters, and furthermore, provide enhanced bit-error rate (BER) performance, compared with a well-known Gaussian monocycle and modified Hermite pulses. This paper analyzes the impact of the proposed pulses' properties, such as their auto- and cross-correlations, on the correlation receiver of the UWB system based on the pulse position modulation. The performance of the proposed pulses are compared with different waveforms under various conditions, such as multipath fading, timing mismatch, and multiuser interference. We also discuss a modulation scheme using the multiple orthogonal pulses to achieve the enhancement of data rate and the impact of the correlation characteristics of the proposed waveforms on the BER performance. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed orthonormal pulses in various conditions, comparing with different waveforms