Finite-resolution digital receiver design for impulse radio ultra-wideband communication

Receiver design for impulse radio based ultrawideband (UWB) communication is a challenge. High sampling rate high resolution digital receiver is usually difficult to implement. Some tradeoffs can be made on the digital receiver, such as limiting amplitude resolution to only one bit, which results in a previously considered monobit receiver. In this paper, we consider the design of finite-resolution digital UWB receivers. We derive the optimal post-quantization processing, and analyze the achievable bit-error rate performance using an approximation of the log-likelihood ratio. Optimal thresholds for 4- and 3-level quantization are obtained. Training-based receiver template estimation is presented. Our work discloses the incremental gain that additional quantization levels offer and the results provide useful guidelines for designing impulse radio UWB digital receivers.