Variance detection for non-coherent impulse radio UWB receivers

In this paper, a novel detection algorithm based on variance detection (VD) is proposed for non-coherent impulse radio (IR) ultra-wideband (UWB) receivers. In the VD-based detection algorithm, after the received IR UWB signals are squared, their variance instead of their mean is measure to recover information bits. Computer simulations show that as compared to the conventional energy detection (ED) based receiver, the newly proposed VD-based receiver can achieve a much better bit-error-rate performance under both AWGN and multipath channels. Furthermore, unlike the conventional ED-based receiver, which is vulnerable to narrowband interference (NBI), the VD-based receiver has an inherent ability to mitigate the destructive effects caused by strong NBI.