Mean bit error rate analysis of high-rate IEEE 802.15.3.a UWB channels

Abstract

In this work, the performance of ultra-wide band systems (UWB) in high-speed wireless networks is studied. At the physical layer of wireless personal area networks, dual carrier modulation driving multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing is implemented for 480 Mbps data rates over 4 classes of UWB scattering channels (CM1, CM2, CM3, CM4) bundeled as per the IEEE 802.15.3a UWB standard. Generalized wireless fading models are presented and canonical expressions for mean bit error rates (MBER) are derived for different modulation and receiver diversity combining schemes. A generating model in terms of the characteristic function of the signal-to-noise ratio is introduced for MBER under general statistical fading conditions, which further develops our previous work. The power density spectral characteristic of the multi-user noise is tuned to a novel generalized innovation-matched filter (GIMF) which is at the core of the UWB receiver. Because of its robustness at also capturing the fading characteristics of the UWB channels, the GIMF detector yields better performance than the classical matched filter and a 10-finger RAKE receiver. The relatively flat CM1 channel is proven to have the best performance, while the highly frequency selective CM4 suffers from the worst performance. CM3 channel slightly outperforms CM4 channel between 0 and 5 dB and exhibits significant improvement over CM4 above 5 dB SNR. CM3 and CM4 channels are proven to have nearly identical performance below 0 dB margins. A comparative analysis was also conducted for the MBER of our model and that of the CF-based model at a 10-finger RAKE receiver developed by Wang et al. It was found that our model outperforms that of the CF-model for CM1 and CM2 channels for a wide dynamic range of SNR values. For CM3 and CM4 channels, our model's performance was superior for SNR values below 8 dB.