Effects of synchronization errors on energy detection of UWB signals

Energy detection is attractive for UWB signal reception because of the low implementation complexity. Its performance in the presence of synchronization errors has not been addressed before. In this paper, we investigate the effects of synchronization errors on conventional energy detection (CED) with orthogonal pulse position modulation (OPPM) and block-coded pulse position modulation (BC-PPM). Moreover, the performance of weighted energy detection (WED) for OPPM and BC-PPM with respect to synchronization errors is also analyzed, where the weight vector is estimated using training symbols. The analytical results enable us to compare different combinations of energy detection and modulation scheme at various synchronization accuracy levels and drive a tradeoff between performance and synchronization requirement. Simulations show that BC-PPM is much less sensitive to mistiming than OPPM, and WED can eliminate the performance degradation caused by synchronization errors greatly.