Soft-Limiting Receiver Structures for Time-Hopping UWB in Multiple-Access Interference

A novel receiver structure based on soft-limiting is proposed for detecting a time-hopping ultrawide-bandwidth (UWB) signal in the presence of multiple-access interference (MAI). The proposed structure contains a nonlinear limiter for suppressing the MAI. Simulation results show that the proposed receiver achieves better bit-error-rate performance than the conventional matched receiver when operating in MAI. When operating in an MAI-plus-Gaussian-noise environment, the receiver structure outperforms the conventional matched-filter receiver for moderate to large values of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A receiver structure with adaptive limiting threshold is further proposed to ensure that the performance of the soft-limiting receiver always meets or surpasses the performance of the conventional UWB receiver for all values of SNR. Application of the soft-limiting structure in the fingers of a rake receiver is shown to enhance the signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio.