Three-Stage Concatenated Ultra-Wide Bandwidth Time-Hopping Spread-Spectrum Impulse Radio Using Iterative Detection

The powerful tool of EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts is used to design a new serially concatenated Irregular Variable Length Coded (IrVLC) and unity-rate precoded Time-Hopping (TH) Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) aided Ultra-Wide Bandwidth (UWB) Spread-Spectrum (SS) impulse radio for near-capacity operation in Nakagami-m fading channels contaminated by Partial Band Noise Jamming (PBNJ). The benefits of the 3-stage concatenation of the TH-UWB detector, the unity-rate decoder and the outer IrVLC decoder are quantified. A number of novel Variable Length Coding (VLC) codebooks having different coding rates are utilized by the IrVLC scheme for encoding specific fractions of the input source symbol stream. More explicitly, EXIT charts are employed to appropriately select these input stream fractions to shape the inverted EXIT curve of the IrVLC in order to match that of the inner decoder and hence to achieve an infinitesimally low Bit Error Ratio (BER) at near-capacity SNR values.