Time-Reversal for UWB Communications Systems

Abstract

Abstract : Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radio is a revolutionary, power-limited technology for its unprecedented system bandwidth and the potential of low-cost and low-power. The most pressing challenge is, however, how to reduce the transceiver complexity of coherent reception caused by the high sampling rate and stringent timing requirements. The proposed system paradigm uses time-reversal with noncoherent detection as an alternative to coherent reception. It exploits the hostile, rich-multipath channel as part of the receiver chain. This new method also integrates time-reversal with Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), the most promising approach to use spectrum and transmission power. As a result, time-reversal trades the huge bandwidth of UWB radio and the high power efficiency of MIMO for the noncoherent detection of extremely low cost. This proposed new system paradigm is to take advantages of the impulse nature of UWB signals, a new dimension of a communication channel, through time-reversed MIMO. The new dimension of impulsive time-reversal adds more degrees of freedom in exploiting the spatiotemporal dimensions. In this project we investigate open problems in the framework of UWB. Our focus is to exploit rich multipath by using time reversal, to simplify the system structure. Experiments and analysis are performed. This final report serves as two purposes: (1) it proposes a big master plan of research for the next two years; (2) it summarizes the results obtained in the last year by the support of the project. The significance of the finished work is clearer in the framework of a three-year plan.