A near-optimal multi-symbol based detector for UWB communications

The generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT)-based multi-symbol transmitted reference detector for UWB systems is an attractive technology to provide high performance communication without explicit channel estimation. Unfortunately, the GLRT-based detector is generally a non-deterministic polynomial time problem in terms of the number of symbols. In this paper, we propose a polynomial-time (O(M³), where M is the number of symbols) detector based on relaxation and modification of the GLRT-based detector. Near-optimal error performance is found in the simulations where the proposed detector attains a tight performance as that of the optimal GLRT detector. The robustness to the multi-access interference is also verified in the simulations.