Pseudo-chaotic encoding applied to ultra-wide-band impulse radio

The idea of applying pseudo-chaotic dynamics to impulse radio (IR) transmission was very recently proposed (Maggio et al. 2001). The approach was to use a pseudo-chaotic digital-signal, fed by the binary information to be transmitted, to drive a very-wide-alphabet pulse-position-modulation, there called pseudo-chaotic time-hopping (TH). Unfortunately this approach turns out to be impractical when dealing with a multiple-user environment. In this paper, we propose an alternative use of pseudo-chaotic dynamics, that are employed as an encoder for the binary data stream to be transmitted, while data-independent TH sequences are used to guarantee ease of synchronization and decodability. The pseudo-chaotic encoder is proposed in its simpler form, with encoding ratio 1: N, and its performance is addressed analytically in terms of bit error probability when using an optimum demodulation technique. The results show that pseudo-chaotic encoding can be an attractive approach to channel coding, particularly in the context of emerging communication techniques such as IR.