A Non-coherent UWB Receiver Using Signal Cluster Sparsity

The ultra-wide band (UWB) technology can be used for low cost and low power applications such as body area networks, IoT based applications, wireless sensor networks and high data rate short range wireless communications. In the UWB literature, non-coherent energy detector (ED) receiver is proposed to reduce receiver implementation complexity by avoiding the complex channel estimation process and relaxing the precise synchronization requirement. However, the ED receiver performance is sensitive to the integration interval, and too large or small value of integration interval degrades the UWB receiver performance. In this paper, we propose a non-coherent UWB receiver by exploiting the cluster-sparsity of the received UWB signal. The proposed receiver structure enhances the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver output as compared to the ED by barring inter-clusters noise accumulation. The bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed non-coherent receiver for time-hopping binary pulse position modulation UWB system is analyzed using IEEE 802.15.4a channel. The proposed receiver design does not require any training and optimization process, and provides 1-3 dB BER performance gain as compared to the conventional ED receiver.