Performance analysis of a software defined subsampling ultra-wideband B-/QPSK impulse radio transceiver

A performance analysis of a reconfigurable software defined ultra-wideband (UWB) binary and quadrature phase shift keying (B-/QPSK) impulse radio (IR) transceiver is presented. The reconfigurable design can be used for measurements investigating the influence of the antenna and channel impulse responses as well as of various types of modulation for UWB communication. The software defined radio (SDR) implementation employs a multi-Nyquist digital to analog converter (DAC) on the transmitter (TX) side whereas the supsampling receiver (RX) consists of a digitizing oscilloscope for evaluation purposes of the proposed concept. The transceiver uses bandpass (BP) sampling, which reduces the requirements of the digital signal processing implemented in a field programmable gate array (FPGA). The bit error ratio (BER) is taken as measure to evaluate the performance in different scenarios. In this paper measurement and simulation results of the BER of B- and QPSK modulation at various test sites is presented. In a multipath environment BPSK provides a robust communication even for large distances. QPSK offers higher data rates in close vicinity to the TX.