Frequency domain detection for ultra-wideband communications in the indoor environment

In this paper, we propose an innovative communication scheme for ultra-wideband systems which are based on impulse radio technologies. The proposed system relies on both the introduction of the cyclic prefix at the transmitter and the use of a frequency domain detector at the receiver. In particular, two different detection strategies based either on the Zero Forcing (ZF) or the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) criteria have been investigated. We have compared our frequency domain approach with the classical RAKE, considering an illustrative scenario where a base station transmits to several mobile terminals in an indoor environment characterized by severe multipath propagation. The results show that the MMSE receiver achieves the best performance with respect to the other schemes, irrespective of the number of active terminals. Hence, the proposed approach is well suited in indoor wireless environment where multipath propagation tends to increase the effects of both the inter-path and the inter-user interference.