Noncoherent autocorrelation detection of orthogonal multicarrier UWB signals

This paper demonstrates noncoherent detection of multicarrier UWB signals, using a multichannel autocorrelation receiver (AcR) frontend. The receiver detects the energy of the subcarrier signals. In principle, the receiver estimates the energy spectrum of the received multicarrier signal. It computes a Fourier transform of the AcR output signals, which are samples of an autocorrelation function of the received signal. The AcR front-end can potentially be implemented in analog hardware, yielding a low-complexity receiver. Remarkably, nonlinear cross products remain limited such that the performance loss is only around 1 dB in a nine-channel system using five AcRs, compared with an energy detector using highly selective subchannel filters.