Design of Pre-Rake DS-UWB Downlink with Pre-Equalization

We consider the design of ultra-wideband (UWB) systems that enable high data rate communications for short-range wireless applications. In particular, we consider the downlink of a direct sequence UWB (DS-UWB) system in which the base station is equipped with multiple antennas and employs pre-rake combining, while each user employs a simple single antenna receiver. We propose the use of multiuser filters for the purpose of pre-equalization at the transmitter in order to mitigate the combined effects of intersymbol interference (ISI) and multiuser interference (MUI) that are generated at the receivers as a result of the wideband nature of the users' channels. For this system, we study the joint design of the transmitter's pre-equalization filters and each receiver's scalar gain under two design criteria. The first design minimizes the total transmitted power from the base station subject to achieving physical layer quality of service requirements of different users. For this design, we show that the calculation of the pre-equalization filters and the receiver gains can be formulated as an efficiently solvable convex optimization problem. In the second design, we consider the minimization of a weighted sum of each user's mean-square error. In order to obtain a computationally tractable solution for this design criterion, we exploit the dual DS-UWB uplink that employs rake combining and post-equalization filters at a central receiver. The numerical studies for each design criterion under realistic models of UWB channel propagation demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multiuser pre-equalization filter designs in mitigating ISI and MUI, and thus their ability to enable reliable pre-rake DS-UWB downlink transmission.