On Rake reception of ultra wideband signals over multipath channels from energy capture perspective

Performance of Rake reception of Ultra Wideband (UWB) signals is evaluated from energy capture perspective. In addition to ordinary all Rake (ARake) and selective Rake (SRake) receivers which are considered in conventional spread spectrum communications, we introduce optimum ARake and SRake receivers which include the estimation of delay of the combining multipaths. Impact of pulse-width is discussed on their performances considering the relationship between pulse-width and fading. Time hopping M-ary pulse position modulation (TH-MPPM) and binary phase shift keying (TH-BPSK) are considered as modulation schemes. Extensive simulation results are presented showing the performances of the Rakes introduced using IEEE 802.15.3a UWB channel models (CM1 to CM3). Performance of MPPM is shown for various values of M and modulation parameters. The impact of pulse-width is illustrated mainly using BPSK. It is shown that the total energy capture (i.e. by ARake) strongly depends on the pulse-width, and the shorter the pulse-width the more is the amount. The energy capture also varies a lot for employing either optimum or ordinary Raking method. Energy capture by SRake additionally strongly depends on the number of combined paths until the number is 20 for optimum SRake and 10 for ordinary SRake; however, afterwards saturating effects are seen. Several aspects regarding the performance versus complexity issue of Rake receivers are also discussed