Impulse UWB energy detection receiver with energy offset synchronization scheme

Impulse ultra-wideband radios (IR-UWB) show strong advantages in low power and low cost applications such as RFIDs and wireless sensor networks. This paper presents an IR-UWB receiver based on energy detection (ED) with on-off keying (OOK) modulation. A novel synchronization and detection algorithm using the energy offset scheme with adaptive threshold detection is suggested, aiming to reduce energy consumption and simplify hardware complexity. Simulation and FPGA implementation reveal that the proposed method can avoid complex and power consuming synchronization blocks, and reduce the preamble length, whereas maintaining the performance in the target level. Hardware integration issues are discussed, implying that the proposed receiver architecture has the possibility to achieve low complexity and low power implementation with several nJs energy per bit, at a data rate of 10 Mb/s.