Ultra-wideband multiple access: unification and narrowband interference analysis

Interference from co-existing narrowband services constitutes the bottleneck of ultra-wideband (UWB) communications. To quantify interference and compare UWB systems on that basis, a general framework is needed. In this paper, we develop a unifying transmission and Rake reception model for UWB multiple access encompassing existing and novel spreading codes: direct-sequence (DS), digital single- and multi-carrier (SC/MC), time-hopping (TH), and combinations of them. Performance analysis is also carried out in closed-form. The relative merits of several UWB systems are further assessed by simulations, in narrowband interference (NBI), multipath, and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), for both matched-filter (MF), and minimum, mean-square error (MMSE) Rake receivers.