The impact of a wideband channel on UWB system design

The goal of this work is to investigate the unique system implementation issues associated with an ultra-wideband channel. The paper begins with channel models and from the characteristics of these models, the cost of doing coherent detection, including channel estimation and maximum ratio combining, is analyzed and simulated. The results show that using a signal bandwidth ranging over 500 MHz to 2 GHz has better system performance than using the entire available 7 GHz bandwidth. It is also shown that matched filtering in UWB plays a more critical role than in a narrowband system. Finally, the impact of imperfect matched filtering is analyzed and simulated.