On the performance of transmitted-reference impulse radio

We consider a time-hopping impulse-radio system that uses transmitted-reference pulses for implicit channel estimation and equalization. A hybrid receiver structure first performs a filtering matched to the hopping sequence, and a subsequent correlation of the data pulses with the reference pulses. We analyze the performance of such a system both in AWGN and in multipath. For the AWGN case, we give exact expressions for the bit error probability that take into account the non-Gaussian nature of the noise-noise crossterms arising in the correlators. For the multipath case, we analyze inter-frame interference, as well as multipath interference from the reference pulse to the data pulse, providing dosed-form equations in the limit of a large number of multipath components.