Noncoherent ultra-wideband (de)modulation

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radios have received increasing attention recently for their potential to overlay legacy systems, their low-power consumption and low-complexity implementation. Because of the pulsed or duty-cycled nature of the ultra-short transmitted waveforms, timing synchronization and channel estimation pose major, and often conflicting, challenges and requirements. In order to address (or in fact bypass) both tasks, we design and test noncoherent UWB (de)modulation schemes, which remain operational even without timing and channel information. Relying on integrate-and-dump operations of what we term "dirty templates,"we first derive a maximum likelihood (ML) optimal noncoherent UWB demodulator. We further establish a conditional ML demodulator with lower complexity. Analysis and simulations show that both can also be applied after (possibly imperfect) timing acquisition. Under the assumption of perfect timing, our noncoherent UWB scheme reduces to a differential UWB system. Our approach can also be adapted to a transmitted reference (TR) UWB system. We show that the resultant robust-to-timing TR (RTTR) approach considerably improves performance of the original TR system in the presence of timing offsets or residual timing acquisition errors.