Time-hopping Impulse Radio System Research Articles

Enhancing the Bitrate and Power Spectral Density of PPM TH-IR UWB Signals using a Sub-Slot Technique

Increasing the receiver’s bitrate and suppressing the spectral line are issues of major interest in the design of compliant Time-Hopping Impulse Radio (TH-IR) Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) systems. Suppression of spectral lines has been commonly addressed by randomizing the position of each pulse to make the period as large as possible. Our analysis suggests that this influences the overall shape of a signal’s Power Spectral Density (PSD) in a way that is useful for spectral line suppression or diminishing the PSD maximum peak power. A method for utilizing the system to generate a Dynamic-Location Pulse-Position Modulated (DLPPM) signal for transmission across a UWB communications channel is presented, and an analytical derivation of the PSD of a proposed DLPPM signal TH-IR UWB is introduced. Our proposed method can be applied without affecting the users of other concurrent applications. The theoretical model for DPLM TH-IR is compared with the PSD for conventional DPLM TH-IR. The results show that spectral estimation methods based on Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) significantly overestimate the continuous part of the PSD for small and medium signal lengths, which has implications for assessing interference margins by means of simulation. Another purpose of this paper is to improve a predesigned system by increasing the receiver’s bitrate. This will be achieved by using the bits that control the sub-slot technique as information and designing a receiver capable of detecting them. The bitrate is effectively doubled. Finally, the proposed system for DPLM TH-IR has been built inside Simulink/MATLAB to test its results via a conventional DPLM TH-IR system.

Differentially-Encoded Di-Symbol Time-Division Multiuser Impulse Radio in UWB Channel

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems are expected to operate in a highly frequency-selective multipath fading environment. To exploit multipath diversity gains in a multiuser scenario, we developed a differentially-encoded, di-symbol time-division multiuser impulse radio (d2TD-IR) system with delay-sum autocorrelation receivers. In traditional time-division multiple access systems, each user transmits a single pulse during a symbol duration in a pre-assigned chip which is longer than maximum excess delay of the channel. However, due to the exponential decay property of UWB channel, we proposed the use of much shorter chip duration, which significantly increases the transmission rate. Because dense pulse transmission will induce multiuser interference, two time-hopping access sequences, which alternately encode the odd- and even-index symbols, are employed with delay-sum autocorrelation receivers to maximally suppress the interference. It was shown that when the chip duration is properly chosen, the proposed system outperforms the conventional time-hopping impulse radio system at high signal-to-noise ratio. This paper also proposed a method to estimate the optimal chip duration when only the average power decay profile of the UWB channel is known.

Two-Stage Acquisition in Time-Hopping Impulse Radio Systems for UWB Communications

Ultra wideband impulse radio is a promising radio technology for networks delivering extremely high data rates at short ranges. The use of extremely short duration pulses however makes synchronization task more difficult. In this paper a two-stage acquisition with serial search noncoherent correlator for time hopping impulse radio is proposed. The proposed two-stage acquisition scheme gets chip timing synchronization, and aligns phase of the local time-hopping code in two stages successively. With the aid of flow-graph approach, the analytical expressions are presented for the mean acquisition time and the probability of acquisition. Numerical results in a slow fading channel show that the proposed two-stage acquisition method can offer much shorter mean acquisition time or much higher probability of acquisition than that of the conventional acquisition.

Narrowband Interference Suppression in Time-Hopping Impulse Radio Ultra-Wideband Communications

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has been considered an innovative solution for future short-range high-speed wireless communications. Interference suppression is important for the UWB devices to operate over spectrum occupied by narrowband systems. In this paper, the use of a notch filter in time-hopping impulse radio (TH-IR) for UWB communication is considered, where a Gaussian monopulse is employed with pulse position modulation. Lognormal channel fading is assumed, and a complete analytical framework is provided for the performance evaluation of using a transversal-type notch filter to reject narrowband interference (NBI). A closed-form expression of bit-error probability is derived, and the numerical results show that the use of a notch filter can improve the system performance significantly. Furthermore, a performance comparison between TH-IR and multicarrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) UWB systems is made under the conditions of the same transmit power, the same data rate, and the same bandwidth. It is shown that in the presence of NBI, the TH-IR system and MC-CDMA system achieve similar performance when both use a notch filter

Spectral shaping of UWB signals for time-hopping impulse radio

This paper studies the design of signaling waveforms for time-hopping impulse radio (TH-IR) with limits on the power spectral density. Such restrictions are imposed by the spectral mask prescribed by frequency regulators for ultra-wideband (UWB) signals. The "conventional" TH-IR system with pulse-position modulation and time-hopping multiple access gives rise to spectral lines that either violate the regulations, or require a significant power backoff. To remedy this situation, we propose the use of polarity randomization, which eliminates the spectral lines and also leads to a smoothing of the continuous part of the spectrum. We analyze different variants of the polarity randomization, considering short and long randomization sequences, as well as symbol-based or pulse-based randomization. We analyze the effect of this technique on both pulse position modulation and binary phase-shift keying modulation.

A Low-Cost Time-Hopping Impulse Radio System for High Data Rate Transmission

We present an efficient, low-cost implementation of time-hopping impulse radio that fulfills the spectral mask mandated by the FCC and is suitable for high-data-rate, short-range communications. Key features are: (i) all-baseband implementation that obviates the need for passband components, (ii) symbol-rate (not chip rate) sampling, A/D conversion, and digital signal processing, (iii) fast acquisition due to novel search algorithms, (iv) spectral shaping that can be adapted to accommodate different spectrum regulations and interference environments. Computer simulations show that this system can provide 110Mbit/s at 7-10m distance, as well as higher data rates at shorter distances under FCC emissions limits. Due to the spreading concept of time-hopping impulse radio, the system can sustain multiple simultaneous users, and can suppress narrowband interference effectively.

Performance evaluation of impulse radio UWB systems with pulse-based polarity randomization

In this paper, the performance of a binary phase shift keyed random time-hopping impulse radio system with pulse-based polarity randomization is analyzed. Transmission over frequency-selective channels is considered and the effects of inter-frame interference and multiple access interference on the performance of a generic Rake receiver are investigated for both synchronous and asynchronous systems. Closed form (approximate) expressions for the probability of error that are valid for various Rake combining schemes are derived. The asynchronous system is modelled as a chip-synchronous system with uniformly distributed timing jitter for the transmitted pulses of interfering users. This model allows the analytical technique developed for the synchronous case to be extended to the asynchronous case. An approximate closed-form expression for the probability of bit error, expressed in terms of the autocorrelation function of the transmitted pulse, is derived for the asynchronous case. Then, transmission over an additive white Gaussian noise channel is studied as a special case, and the effects of multiple-access interference is investigated for both synchronous and asynchronous systems. The analysis shows that the chip-synchronous assumption can result in over-estimating the error probability, and the degree of over-estimation mainly depends on the autocorrelation function of the ultra-wideband pulse and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio of the system. Simulations studies support the approximate analysis.

Low-Complexity Multiuser Detectors for Time-Hopping Impulse-Radio Systems

Impulse radio (IR) and especially time-hopping IR (TH-IR) systems have attracted considerable attention since their introduction in the context of ultra wide-band (UWB) systems in the early 1990s. Recently, with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission actions allowing for the wide-spread use of UWB radio systems, the interest in these systems has grown further. These systems promise to deliver high data rates in multiple access communication channels with very simple transmitter and receiver designs. The importance of multiuser detection for achieving high data rates with these systems has already been established in several studies. This paper studies several low-complexity multiuser detectors specifically designed for TH-IR radio systems. It is demonstrated that many multiuser detectors developed primarily for direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems can be used essentially without any change in TH-IR receivers. Further, several novel, low-complexity multiuser detectors that exploit the special signal structure used for transmission by TH-IR systems are developed. These novel detectors are analyzed both theoretically and via simulations. It is shown that a very simple iterative multiuser detector yields performance that is similar to that of a single-user system.