On the performance of using multiple transmit and receive antennas in pulse-based ultrawideband systems

This paper presents an analytical expression for the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the pulse position modulated (PPM) signal in an ultrawideband (UWB) channel with multiple transmit and receive antennas. A generalized fading channel model that can capture the cluster property and the highly dense multipath effect of the UWB channel is considered. Through simulations, it is demonstrated that the derived analytical model can accurately estimate the mean and variance properties of the pulse-based UWB signals in a frequency-selective fading channel. Furthermore, the authors investigate to what extent the performance of the PPM-based UWB system can be further enhanced by exploiting the advantage of multiple transmit antennas or receive antennas. Numerical results show that using multiple transmit antennas in the UWB channel can improve the system performance in the manner of reducing signal variations. However, because of already possessing rich diversity inherently in the UWB channel, using multiple transmit antennas does not provide diversity gain in the strict sense [i.e., improving the slope of bit error rate (BER) versus SNR] but can possibly reduce the required fingers of the RAKE receiver for the UWB channel. Furthermore, because multiple receive antennas can provide higher antenna array combining gain, the multiple receive antennas technique can be used to improve the coverage performance for the UWB system, which is crucial for a UWB system due to the low transmission power operation.