Practical Demonstration of Filterbank Receiver for Ultra-Wideband Radios

In this paper we show that a filterbank receiver architecture for ultra-wideband impulse radio systems is adequate in dense multi-path channels. This approach is derived from a time-frequency representation of the received signal by means of the short time Fourier transform. The receiver consists of an analog section containing bandpass filters followed by a bank of analog-to-digital converters (ADC), while digital processing then synchronizes the receiver and compensates for channel impairments. The filterbank receiver is analyzed in terms of error probability over multi-path channels, leading to a closed form expression of the bit error probability under the hypothesis of synchronized reception. Simulation results for non-line of sight channels show that the performance of the proposed receiver is close to the matched filter bound even with a moderate number of filters. We present a testbed has been implemented to provide a practical demonstration of the capabilities of the FB receiver. Measurement results on channel estimation show that dispersive channels are adequately captured