Oversampled weighted autocorrelation receivers for transmitted-reference UWB systems

Combining transmitted-reference (TR) signalling with an autocorrelation receiver (AcR) is an elegant way to obtain a low-complexity, sub-optimal UWB communication system. Currently, many issues regarding these systems are unsolved. In this paper, the usage of an alternative AcR is proposed, which enables simplified synchronization and integration duration optimization at the cost of a higher clock rate. The proposed AcR allows for weighted sum combining of the oversampled correlator output to improve the system performance. A statistical characterization of noise and intra-/inter-symbol-interference at the oversampled correlator output is provided, as well as two methods to derive the weighted sum coefficients, along with a method to compute the bit error probability. The performance of different UWB TR systems, all using the proposed AcR, is presented and discussed taking implementation aspects into account. These systems differ with respect to delay, bandwidth, sampling rate and bit rate.