An impulse radio asynchronous transceiver for high data rates

The purpose of this paper is to provide an operative way of achieving high data rates for impulse radio (IR) transmission based systems. Since applications targeted for ultra wide band (UWB) are liable to be low-cost, we especially focus on simple transceiver design. To that effect, we present an original demodulation scheme adapted to a multi-band ON-OFF keying modulation. From the receiver point of view, we impose relaxed channel estimation constraints and derive suitable signal processing schemes and simple hardware architectures. Indeed, we only consider the benefit from a limited a priori channel knowledge: approximative delay spread and energy level. The associated optimum demodulation turns out to be a non-trivial energetic threshold comparison whose precise theoretical computation admits an analytical solution proving its feasibility. Numerical results are eventually performed for IEEE 802.15.3a channel models and FCC requirements; they obviously demonstrate the potential of these techniques.