Receiver Designs for Differential UWB Systems with Multiple Access Interference

Most existing differential receivers for ultra-wideband (UWB) communications employ Gaussian approximation for multiple access interference (MAI). However, for a system with strong interference caused by a small number of active users, significant performance degradation is found for differential UWB receivers due to the impreciseness of Gaussian approximation on impulsive MAI. In this paper, we propose new differential UWB receivers based on the generalized Gaussian (GG) distribution, which subsumes Gaussian distribution and Laplace distribution as special cases. Numerical results show that the GG distribution approximates MAI well. In addition, we show that GG-based multiple-symbol differential receivers can be formulated as the same form as the conventional multiple-symbol differential receivers, which can be efficiently solved using existing algorithms. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed receivers to that of the existing differential UWB receivers when the interference caused by a small number of active users is strong.