Generalized transmitted-reference UWB systems

Transmitted-reference (TR) ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless communication systems [R. Hoctor et al., Jan. 2002] can relax the difficult UWB timing requirements and can provide a simple receiver that gathers the energy from the many resolvable multipath components. However, TR-UWB's relatively poor bit error rate (BER) performance and low data rate have limited its application. In this paper, the TR-UWB idea is generalized to address both of these issues. In particular, the aspects of the system that provide the desirable multipath gathering ability and timing attributes are retained, while the remainder of the system is optimized, resulting in a significantly different signaling scheme and receiver back-end. Numerical results for two examples indicate a significant BER improvement over standard TR-UWB under the same timing requirement.