Non-Coherent Fourth-Order Detector for Impulse Radio Ultra Wideband Systems: Empirical Evaluation Using Channel Measurements

Low-complex and low-power non-coherent energy detectors (EDs) are interesting for low data rate impulse radio (IR) ultra wideband (UWB) systems, but suffer from a loss in performance compared to coherent receivers. The performance of an ED also strongly depends on the integration interval (window size) of the integrator and the window position. This paper presents a non-coherent fourth-order detector (FD) which can discriminate between Gaussian noise signals and non-Gaussian IR-UWB signals by directly estimating the fourth-order moment of the received signal. The performance of the detectors is evaluated using realistic channels measured in a corridor, an office and a laboratory environment. The results show that bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the proposed FD receiver is slightly better than the ED in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region and its performance improves as the SNR increases. In addition, BER of the FD receiver is less sensitive to overestimation of the integration interval making it relatively robust to variations of the channel delay spread. Finally, a criteria for the selection of integration time of the proposed detector is suggested.