Performance of coded transmitted reference pulse cluster UWB systems

A transmitted reference pulse cluster (TRPC) structure has recently been proposed for low date rate ultra-wideband (UWB) communications. In the uncoded case, TRPC has been shown to outperform the conventional transmitted reference (TR) and non-coherent pulse position modulation (NC-PPM) methods. Moreover, it overcomes the long delay line implementation problem of the conventional TR technique. In this paper, the TRPC-UWB system is further developed to include practical forward error correction (FEC) coding techniques such as those specified in the IEEE 802.15.4a standard, as well as more powerful convolutional codes. By employing a Gaussian approximation in the inter-pulse interference (IPI) analysis and performance bounds for FEC codes, bit error rate (BER) upper bounds (UBs) are derived for coded TRPC and coded NC-PPM. Our simulation and semi-analytical results show that for the same coding scheme, TRPC provides more coding gains than NC-PPM. We also show that the coding scheme plays a crucial role in system performance, and therefore should be carefully designed according to the implementation requirements.