Performance comparison of UWB impulse-based multiple access schemes in indoor multipath channels

In this paper, we consider an impulse-based ultra- wideband (UWB) receiver and assess the performance of different multiple access and modulation schemes, including time-hopping pulse position modulation (TH-PPM), time-hopping binary phase shift keying (TH-BPSK), and BPSK-BPSK, under both the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and indoor multipath (CM3) channel assumptions. The assumed receiver combines the received pulses to increase the signal to noise ratio (SNR) and correlates the summed signal with the locally generated template. The performance of the different techniques are estimated using Monte-Carlo simulations and validated by comparing them with the theoretical results obtained for the AWGN channel with the characteristic function (CF) method presented in [1], Amongst other results, we show that the AWGN channel assumption provides rather optimistic results as compared to the more realistic CM3 indoor channel assumption.