Low complexity suboptimal monobit receiver for transmitted-reference impulse radio UWB systems

In this paper, a low complexity suboptimal monobit receiver, denoted as Q-function estimation (QFE) based monobit receiver, is proposed for transmitted-reference (TR) based impulse radio (IR) ultra wideband (UWB) systems to mitigate the performance degradation caused by severe quantization noise due to employing monobit ADCs. Through accumulating reference samples over multiple blocks, the QFE-based monobit receiver can considerably reduce the noise-on-noise effect and optimize the contribution of each sample to the decision statistic. Computer simulations demonstrate that in both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS (NLOS) channels the QFE-based monobit weighted TR receiver can achieve a close-to-optimal bit-error rate (BER) performance without requiring full channel state information. Furthermore, because the optimal combining weights can be obtained offline and saved into a lookup table, the complexity of the proposed suboptimal monobit receiver is quite low. Therefore, it is considered as a promising technology for IR-UWB applications requiring low system complexity and low power consumption.