Finite-resolution receiver performance for IR-UWB target detection

Detection oriented UWB wireless sensor node places several stringent requirements on compatibility, power consumption and implementation cost. The compatibility requirements mandate the digital realization by using high speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC). However, the need of full resolution, extremely high speed ADC contradict to the application demand of low cost and power consumption. Finite-resolution sampling receiver is a practically appealing approach to relax the demand of high-rate ADC. To demonstrate the theoretical feasibility of low-bit sampling technique in target detection, the quantization based detection algorithm is elaborated. The performance characteristics from theoretical values and simulation results are presented for different sampling resolutions; detailed analysis of setting the optimal quantization step are also included. All these results provide useful guidelines for using low-complexity finite-resolution technique in UWB target detection.