Digital Pulse Interval Modulation for Ultra-Wideband Transmission with Energy Detection

This paper presents a study of digital pulse interval modulation (DPIM) for ultra-wideband (UWB) systems with energy detection. The modulation scheme and transmission capacity based on the definition in this paper are discussed and expressions for error probability in terms of slot error rate (SER) and packet error rate (PER) are presented. PER performance comparison is made with that of on-off keying (OOK) and pulse position modulation (PPM). Numerical results are presented for both IEEE 802.15.3a and IEEE 802.15.4a channel models. For certain modulation orders (e.g., 4-DPIM vs 2-PPM), this paper shows that DPIM is superior to PPM in both PER performance and transmission capacity. Compared with OOK, appropriate tradeoffs for DPIM can be made between PER performance and transmission capacity.