Performance analysis of a TH/DS N-ary BPPM UWB system

A hybrid time-hopping/direct-sequence (TH/DS) multiple access ultra-wideband (UWB) system using N-ary biorthogonal pulse position modulation (BPPM) is proposed and analysed in this paper. Based on the analytical characteristic function method, we derive the accurate probability distribution of the multiple access interference and calculate the average symbol error rate (SER) of the proposed system. Simulation results are provided to verify the analytical frameworks in additive white Gaussian noise channel and to illustrate the system performance in realistic UWB fading channels. The proposed TH/DS N-ary BPPM system is shown to provide better SER performance compared with that of the conventional TH M-ary PPM scheme. We also investigate the trade-off of the proposed system parameters with fixed bit rate and fixed signal bandwidth. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.