Frequency Domain Detectors for Different Data-Rate Short-Range UWB Communications

Low and high data-rate applications can be foreseen for future ultra-wideband systems which are based on impulse radio and proper detection schemes have to be designed for the most general scenarios. In this paper, we study the performance of a suitable communication scheme in two different short-range communication scenarios where a base station transmits low or high data-rate flows to several mobile terminals in an indoor environment characterized by severe multipath propagation. The proposed system relies on both the introduction of the cyclic prefix at the transmitter and the use of a frequency domain detector at the receiver. Two different detection strategies based either on the zero forcing (ZF) or on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criteria have been investigated and compared with the classical RAKE. The results show that the proposed approach is well suited in indoor wireless environment where multipath propagation tends to increase the effects of the interference