On the performance of one bit time reversal for multi-user wireless communications

Time reversal (TR) technique can be used to achieve temporal focusing (compression of the effective channel impulse response in time) and spatial focusing (concentration of the transmit energy in space). In this paper the performance advantage and its trade off in the traditional time reversal system and its simplified version the one bit time reversal systems are discussed. Analytical solutions for the temporal and spatial focusing metrics are derived and served as the base for the comparison on the performance of the two TR systems. It is showed that although there is some degradation in the temporal focusing performance of the one bit TR system, its spatial focusing performance surprisingly outperforms that of the traditional TR system. The analytical investigations are verified using measurement data from recent UWB measurement campaign.