Estimation of integration interval for energy detectors in UWB using compressed sensing

The new sampling method, known as Compressive sampling (CS), enables measurement of signal with a large reduction in sampling and storage requirements if the signal has a sparse representation in certain domain. CS has several signal processing applications in diverse fields like signal acquisition, compression, sensor networks etc. In UWB communication systems, transmission of very narrow pulses through UWB multipath channel results in a signal which is sparse in time domain. Thus, the CS principles can be used with UWB signals. In this paper, using CS we develop a method for estimating the exact integration interval for an energy detector in UWB communication system. The effective capturing of the maximum signal energy improves the performance of the non-coherent receivers to a great extent. It is assumed that a (known) “pilot” signal is transmitted preceding the actual data. At the receiver, the random projections of the received pilot signal is used to generate a reference for the estimation of the exact integration interval. Orthogonal Matching Pursuit (OMP) algorithm is used for the reconstruction of the pilot signal. It has been observed that the estimation error for a UWB pulse at a bit rate of 100Mbps, in an IEEE 802.15.4a channel is very minimal.