Mitigating the effects of destructive ISI in IR-UWB wireless systems

Abstract

IR-UWB systems used in multipath rich channels are very susceptible to signal distortion due to ISI as well as signal attenuation due to destructive ISI. Equalizers can be used to undo signal distortion due to ISI but any signal attenuation due to destructive ISI would still be present and this would lead to lower effective data transmission rates.

In this Thesis, we propose a solution that helps to undo signal distortion due to ISI while reducing the effects of destructive ISI as well and thus permitting higher effective data transmission rates. This is particularly useful for IR-UWB systems operating between 3.1 GHz and 10.6 GHz which are subject to the low power emission restrictions imposed by the FCC.

In this Thesis, we review most of the commonly used equalization techniques and compare their performance against our proposed solution in a multipath channel with destructive ISI. We then compare the BER of these different types of equalizers over various SNR values and their computational complexity and show that our proposed solution performs better than most commonly used equalizers.