Impact of group delay in RF BPF on impulse radio systems

This paper presents analysis results of the effects of RF filter characteristics on the system performance of impulse radio. The impulse radio system transmits modulated pulses having very short time duration and information can be extracted in receiver side based on cross-correlation between received and transmitted pulses. Accordingly, the pulse distortion due to in-band group delay variation can cause serious system performance degradation. In general, RF bandpass filters inevitably cause group delay difference to the signal passing through the filter which is proportional to its skirt characteristic due to its resonance phenomenon. For time as well as frequency domain analysis, small signal scattering parameter S₂₁ and its Fourier transform are used to characterize output pulse waveform under the condition that the input and output ports are matched. The output pulse waveform of the filter is predicted based on convolution integral between input pulse and filter transfer function, and resulting BER (bit error rate) performances in the BPM (bi-phase modulation) and PPM (pulse position modulation) based impulse radio system are calculated.