Impact of Pulse Shapes on the Performance of an Ultra-Wideband Multiple-Access Fast Acquisition System

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems provide very high data rates by transmitting extremely short duration pulses. The impulse waveform is one of the key factors that influence the performance of these systems. While fulfilling the FCC spectral emission requirements, the pulse shape must offer high detection capabilities with suitable levels of accuracy. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of pulse shapes on the performance of an UWB computationally-efficient acquisition scheme in the presence of multiple user interference (MUI) and Gaussian noise. In the comparisons, different pulses with same duration were used in extensive Monte-Carlo simulations. Results show that the pulse shape has a noticeable impact on the performance of our UWB computationally-efficient acquisition scheme. Moreover, it is concluded that the 6th or the 8th order Gaussian derivative is the most suitable pulse shape to choose, depending on spectral bandwidth requirements.