Quantifying the Degradation of Combined MUI and Multipath Effects in Impulse-Radio UWB

We study pulse-based ultra wideband (UWB) communications over multipath channels using asynchronous spread spectrum (SS) multiple access (MA) based on time-hopping (TH) and pulse position modulated (PPM) signals. More specifically, we analyze the signal-to-interference (SIR) degradation in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), multi-user interference (MUI), and dense multipath effects (DME) with line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS). In particular, we define a degradation margin factor for the combined MUI and multipath effects and also find an expression for the maximum number of simultaneous radio links N
_u
in terms of the operating SIR, the SS processing gain, and the bit transmission rate R
_b
. We consider both cases with perfect and imperfect power control.