Performance of M-ary PPM UWB radio in fading channels

This paper investigates the performance of M-ary pulse position modulation (PPM) multiuser ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems in terms of symbol error rate (SER) over fading and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Based on Gaussian approximation for the multiple access interference, an expression for the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is derived for the UWB system. This expression is used to derive exact SER expressions for coherent UWB receivers. The effect of pulse selection on the SER of multiuser UWB system is studied. In addition to rectangular pulse, the 2nd derivative Gaussian waveform and Rayleigh pulses were considered. We show that the system capacity and/or SER performance can be significantly increased by using the monocycle pulse in fading channels.