Performance analysis of a flexible subsampling receiver for pulsed UWB signals

This paper presents a flexible digital receiver for pulsed ultra-wideband (UWB) communications which is sampling below Nyquist rate. This receiver can trade demodulation performance for sampling rate, i.e. power consumption. The bit error rate for pulse amplitude and pulse position modulations is evaluated in AWGN and typical UWB channels. The performance of several types of equalizer is compared, taking into account their implementation complexity. A suboptimal but implementation efficient minimum mean-square error (MMSE) equalizer which reaches performances similar to the ideal MMSE equalizer is proposed. The impact of imperfect knowledge of the propagation channel and signal-to-noise ratio, due to the limited number of training symbols, on the performance of the receiver is assessed. Finally, the receiver architecture and implementation cost are discussed. The proposed subsampling receiver provides an attractive alternative to classical architectures based on correlation with a template.