Automatic gain controlling in IR-UWB communications designed for wireless sensors

Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband (IR-UWB) communication system according to the standard IEEE.802.15.4a supporting non-coherent reception is discussed with the focus on the automatic gain controller (AGC). The performance of the transceiver is evaluated under noisy and common multipath channel environments. Simulation results confirm that a simple non-coherent, low power IR-UWB receiver can achieve the sensitivity of -70 dBm for the input signal with 250 MHz analogue using a 6 bit analogue to digital converter with a sampling frequency of 62.4 MHz. It presents the maximum achievable performance from the system under consideration where integrating circuit and slower analogue to digital converter are incorporated. The sensitivity of the receiver can be further improved by using a higher resolution ADC where -100 dBm received signal is still detected with 12 bit ADC.