An improved conditional maximum-likelihood detector for noncoherent UWB communication

A noncoherent UWB demodulation and detection algorithm has been proposed that circumvents the problems of timing synchronization and channel estimation for impulse based UWB systems. Originally two detection algorithms were offered, a maximum-likelihood sequence detector and a reduced complexity conditional ML detector. We offer an improvement to the conditional ML detector based on the observation that for this algorithm it does not matter whether or not the bursts are detected in forward or reverse order. Our algorithm improves performance by roughly 0.8 dB over the previous conditional ML detector.