On the BER performance of pulse-position-modulation UWB radio in multipath channels

The impact of multipath propagation on ultra wide band (UWB) radio, which is carrier free, is quite different from that on conventional radio. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the bit error rate (BER) performance of binary pulse-position-modulation (PPM) UWB radio in multipath channels. The BER formula is derived. Particular attention is paid to the effect of the propagation time-delay on the BER performance. It is also noted that, for the PPM scheme, the multipath propagation time-delay may lead to unbalanced BERs over "0"-"1" in some particular multipath channels.