IR-UWB Transmitted-Reference Systems with Partial Channel Knowledge: a Receiver Design Based on the Statistical Invariance Principle

This paper deals with detection algorithms for impulse- radio ultrawideband transmitted-reference systems. For binary modulation schemes, we propose a novel detector that operates on the partial autocorrelations of the received signal as computed over time intervals (bins) of size less than the symbol period. Assuming that the receiver has knowledge of the partial autocorrelations of the channel response over those bins, we derive the minimum error probability detector (MEPD). In doing so, we exploit some invariance properties of the detection problem under consideration. It turns out that the receiver adopting such a strategy is superior to a conventional TR system, the more so the smaller the bin size is. Also, we address the problem of estimating the partial autocorrelations of the channel response and propose a simple solution by exploiting a training sequence. The impact of the estimation errors on the receiver performance is shown to be marginal.