Differentially-Keyed IR-UWB Signals for MA with Differential-Detection Receiver

Noncoherent communication receivers (differential-detectors) have simple design, however, they always incur bit error rate (BER) performance loss up to 3dB compared to coherent receivers. In this paper, a differential-detector is proposed for impulse radio ultra wideband (IR-UWB) com-munication systems. The system employs bit-level differential phase shift keying (DPSK) com-bined with code division (CD) for IR-UWB signals to support multiple-access (MA). It is analyzed under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) corrupted by multiple-access interference (MAI) channel. Its BER performance is compared against a reference coherent receiver using Monte-Carlo simulation method. A closed form expression for its average probability of error is derived analytically. Simulation results and theoretical analysis confirm the applicability of the proposed differential-detector for IR-UWB communication systems