System performance analysis of IR-UWB in multipath environment

To analyze the impulse radio ultra-wideband(IR-UWB) system performance in multipath environment, a system model with coherent demodulation in the presence of inter-symbol interference, intra-symbol multipath interference and additive white Gaussian noise is proposed, and the bit error rate(BER) expression is obtained through studying the multipath channel models provided by IEEE 802.15.3a group. To evaluate the accuracy of the expression, its computation result is compared with computer simulation, which shows the expression can match the simulation well. With the expression, the maximum transmission data rate and bandwidth efficiency using Gaussian second derivative function pulses with different durations are analyzed, and the result shows that with the pulse duration shortened the maximum transmission data rate increases obviously while the bandwidth efficiency almost has no change. All these conclusions can be applied to the design of UWB system.