Multiple access capacity of UWB m-ary impulse radio systems with antenna array

In this paper, the multiple access capacity of an Mary pulse position modulation (PPM) impulse radio (IR) system with antenna array is analyzed in dense multipath environments. An antenna array with Rake receivers is used to capture the signal energy from multipaths. Multiple access performance of the system is evaluated in terms of number of supported users for a given bit error rate and bit transmission rate with different number of antenna elements and selected paths. Numerical results show that the multiple access capacity of an M-ary IR system can be improved significantly by increasing the number of antenna elements and/or by adding more paths coherently at the receiver.