The effects of timing jitter on the performance of impulse radio

Impulse radio is a promising ultra-wideband technique for tactical military communications. Key features of time-hopping impulse radio are the very narrow pulses used to convey information. Analysis of such time-hopping schemes under a variety of assumptions have been reported in the literature. However, none of these studies to date consider the effects of timing jitter on time-hopping in a UWB setting. In this paper we consider the effects of timing jitter on the performance of binary and 4-ary UWB communications. We find that the performance of impulse radio is very sensitive to timing jitter, at least in part due to the very narrow pulses. We also find that for our detection performance criteria, the 4-ary PPM system outperforms binary offset PPM at all jitter levels in thermal and pulse noise. However, the benefit of 4-ary PPM relative to the offset binary case is diminished with increased timing jitter at these same levels.