On the performance of ultra-wide-band signals in Gaussian noise anddense multipath

摘要

An ultra-wide-band (UWB) signal is characterized by a radiatednspectrum with a very wide bandwidth around a relatively low centernfrequency. In this paper, we study the reduced fading margin property ofnUWB signals. To evaluate the fading margin, we compare the performancenof UWB signals in an environment with only additive white Gaussian noisen(AWGN) versus the performance of UWB signals in a dense multipathnenvironment with AWGN. The assumption here is that the presence ofnmultipath causes a small increase in the signal-to-noise ratio requirednto achieve reasonable levels of bit error rate. A numerical examplenconfirms this assumption, more specifically, the example shows that tonachieve a bit error rate equal to 10-5, we require about 13.5ndB in the AWGN case and about 15 dB in the multipath case, resulting inna fading margin of just 1.5 dB. This small fading margin can benunderstood by the ability of the UWB signal to resolve the densenmultipath