Design and Analysis of Passband Transmitted Reference Pulse Cluster UWB Systems in the Presence of Phase Noise

Transmitted reference pulse cluster (TRPC) signaling was recently proposed and developed for noncoherent ultra-wideband (UWB) communications. In this paper, a practical passband TRPC-UWB system is designed and analyzed to deal with the carrier frequency offset, phase offset, and phase noise inherent in voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO) of the transmitter and the receiver. Based on a general model of noisy VCO and employing some reasonable assumptions, an equivalent linear time-invariant analytical model is obtained to facilitate the bit error rate (BER) analysis. Our analysis shows that the constant carrier frequency offset and the phase offset can be removed by employing the passband transmitter and the noncoherent receiver. Furthermore, a semi-analytical BER expression is derived to show the impact of phase noise on the system error performance. Simulation results validate the semi-analytical expressions and both of them indicate that TRPC is more robust to the effect of phase noise than the conventional transmitted reference and coherent UWB Rake receivers.