Blind non-coherent receiver schemes for IR-UWB PPM signals with different channel impairments

Owing to the advantage of simple circuitry, energy detection based weighted non-coherent receivers (WNCR) have been motivated for impulse radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) systems in recent years. With an aim to combat the practical channel impairments of different levels, this paper further investigates the combining weights of the WNCR, ending up with two blindly weighted non-coherent receiver (BWNCR) schemes in quasi-static fading channels and severely time-varying channels, respectively. The proposed weighting strategies serve to obtain the weights in completely blind manner, without demanding any system overhead or pilot symbol. Simulations verify that the BER performance of the BWNCR closely approaches the ideal performance of the WNCR, and moreover, the BWNCR possesses inherent robustness in severely time-varying channels.