Performance analysis of time-hopping ultra-wideband systems in multipath fading channels (uncoded and coded schemes)

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of both uncoded and coded multiple access TH-UWB systems introduced in [1-3], in multipath Rayleigh fading channels. The receiver is a selective diversity combining receiver, known as SRake. Based on Gaussian distribution assumption for the multiple access interference at the output of SRake receiver and by using virtual branch technique as introduced in [4-5], the bit error rates for uncoded and coded schemes are derived. Our analysis shows that the effective order of diversity achieved by the coded scheme is the product of the number of branches of SRake receiver and the Hamming distance of the code applied. Furthermore, it indicates that the coded scheme significantly outperforms the uncoded scheme.