A Blind Channel Estimation Technique for TH-PPM UWB Systems

As the UWB systems are designed to operate in environments having dense multipath characteristics (i.e., indoor environments) the channel estimation task is much more involved than the conventional systems. In this paper, we present a new blind channel estimation technique for Time-Hopping Pluse-Position-Modulation (TH-PPM) systems. Our proposed method is based on the Pulse Compression (PC) technique introduced in [1]. In spite of its low complexity, the proposed blind channel estimation method outperforms the Non-Data Aided Maximum Likelihood (NDA-ML) technique. Our simulation results show the promising gain of 4 dB around the Bit Error Rate (BER) of 10-3, compared to NDA-ML. The performance loss, compared to the Perfect Channel Knowledge (PCK) is only 1.5 dB at this BER.