Pulse position amplitude modulation for time-hopping multiple access UWB communications

In this paper, we propose a new modulation scheme called pulse amplitude position modulation (PPAM) for ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems. PPAM combines pulse position modulation (PPM) and pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) to provide good system performance and low computational complexity. A set of MN-ary, M=2^k, N=2^N. PPAM signals are constructed from N-ary orthogonal PPM signals by including M-ary PAM signals in each dimension. It is shown that MN-ary PPAM has better performance than MN-ary PAM and less complexity than MN-ary PPM for MN>2. The channel capacity of PPAM is determined for a time-hopping multiple access UWB communication system. The error probability and performance bounds are derived for a multiuser environment. In particular, it is shown that for M=2. 2N-ary PPAM signals have better performance than 2N-ary PPM with the same throughput and half the computational complexity.