Tradeoffs in the design of sliding block Viterbi decoders for MB-OFDM UWB systems

MultiBand OFDM (MB-OFDM) UWB [1] is a promising short-range wireless technology for high data rate communications up to 480 Mbps. The UWB receiver uses a Viterbi decoder that must support the highest data rate of 480 Mbps. To achieve such high data rates a sliding block Viterbi decoder is a good design candidate. In this paper, we analyze the tradeoffs involved in the design of sliding block Viterbi decoders for the highest data rates of MB-OFDM UWB systems. We have designed a configurable transmitter/receiver of an MB-OFDM UWB system and an AWGN generator in VHDL and determined the bit error rates of the system running in FPGA. The results indicate the relation between bit error rates and different configuration parameters of the sliding block Viterbi decoder.