BER Analysis of Decision-Feedback Multiple-Symbol Detection in Noncoherent MIMO Ultrawideband Systems

In this paper, we investigate noncoherent multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) ultrawideband (UWB) systems where the signal is encoded by differential space-time block code (DSTBC). DSTBC enables noncoherent MIMO UWB systems to achieve diversity gain. However, the traditional noncoherent symbol-by-symbol differential detection (DD) for DSTBC-UWB suffers from performance degradation compared with coherent detection. We introduce a noncoherent multiple-symbol detection (MSD) scheme to enhance the performance of DSTBC-UWB systems. Although the MSD scheme can boost the performance more as the observation window size becomes larger, the complexity of the exhaustive search for MSD also exponentially increases in terms of the window size. To decrease the computational complexity, the concept of decision feedback (DF) is introduced to the MSD for DSTBC-UWB in this paper. The resultant DF-MSD yields reasonable complexity and solid performance improvement. We provide the bit-error-rate analysis for the proposed DF-MSD. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results validate the proposed scheme.