Low-Complexity and Energy Efficient Non-Coherent Receivers for UWB Communications

For UWB impulse radio transmission based on orthogonal pulse-position modulation, signal detection with non-coherent path diversity combing is analyzed. The performance of single- window and weighted sub-window combing is compared with the performance bound of non-coherent detection. This performance bound is derived using the maximum-likelihood decision rule. For numerical evaluations, measured UWB channels (non-LOS, office) are used. Intersymbol interferences are not taken into account, since non-coherent detection is primarily an alternative for low data-rate, low power applications.