A TH-UWB Receiver with Near-MUD Performance for Multiple Access Interference Environments

The multiple access interference (MAI) in a time-hopping (TH) ultra-wideband (UWB) system is known to be non-Gaussian even when the system has a moderately large number of active users. Therefore, the conventional matched filter (CMF) receiver, the optimal structure for Gaussian noise which maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and minimizes the probability of detection error in the absence of non-Gaussian interference, is not necessarily optimal. We express and prove a stronger claim that even the outputs of the matched filters in the conventional UWB receiver can not provide a sufficient decision statistic for detecting the information bits transmitted by the desired user. Further, a novel TH-UWB receiver is introduced which uses a similar methodology to the optimal multiuser detection (MUD) algorithm for detecting the information bits. However, the complexity of this new receiver is much less than that of the optimal MUD algorithm. It employs only one matched filter instead of a bank of matched filters resulting in a simple and low-cost TH-UWB receiver. Simulation results show that the new receiver outperforms previous single-user TH-UWB receivers and achieves essentially the performance of the CMF receiver operating in a single-user system.