Performance analysis of non-coherent UWB receivers at different synchronization levels

Non-coherent ultra-wideband (UWB) receivers require no channel state information for demodulating the received signal. The primary non-coherent receiver in the UWB literature is the autocorrelation receiver, which autocorrelates the received signal at specific time lags, circumventing problems of template signal design and multipath energy combining. A unique advantage of the UWB autocorrelation receiver is its robustness to synchronization errors, which has not been explored yet to date. This paper investigates two major UWB schemes employing autocorrelation receivers: the transmitted reference (TR) scheme (R. Hoctor and H. Tomlinson, 2002) and the differential (DF) scheme (M. Ho et al., 2002). Performance is analyzed for TR and DF receivers at different synchronization accuracy levels, their robustness to synchronization errors is shown, and the existence of a tradeoff between performance and synchronization complexity for non-coherent UWB receivers is revealed. As a result of our analysis, comparisons of TR and DF schemes are also made in the presence of synchronization errors, which have not been addressed before. Simulations corroborate our findings