A framework for analyzing multiple access performance of TH-UWB communications

Ultra Wide Band (UWB) has been proposed in recent years as a suitable transmission technique for various applications in the wireless context and is currently under consideration of standard bodies for e.g. Wireless Personal Area Networks. UWB is also inherently indicated for distributed ad-hoc wireless networks and, in particular, for sensor networks. Since sharing of the common radio resource is crucial to any wireless system, this paper proposes an investigation of the performance of Time Hopping (TH-) UWB in a multi-user environment. Specifically, the expression of the SINR (Signal-to-(Interference + Noise) Ratio) is derived in the presence of a generic family of (multilevel) hopping codes, thus removing the common assumption of i.i.d. random sequences. The key point is to map a TH-UWB system with multi-level sequences into an equivalent Direct Sequence (DS) system with binary sequences. The developed framework is then applied to example cases of multi-level maximal length sequences and multi-level Gold sequences.