Adaptive weighted noncoherent receiver for UWB-PPM signal in multipath channels

Noncoherent receivers are attractive for pulsed UWB systems due to the implementation simplicity. In this paper, a digital weighted noncoherent receiver structure with adaptive estimator for weighting coefficients and integration start point is proposed to alleviate the noise effect in detecting UWB-PPM signals. The detector adopts a square-law integrator, and allows the integrator output captured in different integration time windows to be weighted and linear combined based on the signal contribution within each integration window. Optimal and suboptimal weighting coefficients are derived to maximize the detection BER. Both analysis and simulations verify the effectiveness of weighted processing in reducing the noise level in noncoherent reception.