Hybrid Coherent and Frequency-Shifted-Reference Ultrawideband Radio

Ultrawideband communications often occur in heterogeneous networks where different receivers have different complexity and energy consumption requirements. In this case it is desirable to have a modulation scheme that works well with coherent receivers as well as simpler receivers, namely transmitted-reference (TR) receivers. In particular, we consider a TR scheme that employs slightly frequency-shifted reference (FSR) signals [15] and thus avoids one of the main drawbacks of conventional TR schemes, namely the need to implement a delay line. We propose and analyze a modulation scheme that works well with both FSR receivers (where it has the same performance as conventional TR modulation), and coherent receivers. Coherent receivers receiving conventional TR modulation suffer a 3 dB penalty, because they cannot make use of the energy invested into the reference pulse. Our proposed scheme avoids this drawback by including a data preprocessor that can be viewed as a nonsystematic rate-1/2 convolutional code with a high constraint length. These codes give 1.5 dB gain over our previously proposed constraint-length-two systematic codes at a BER of 1 times 10^-4 in 802.15.3a CM4 multipath fading channels.