A turbo-like transceiver for imperfect orthogonal access in UWB-IR systems

The development of wireless personal area networks is one of the key challenges in the new frontier of communications. The standardization activities of the IEEE802.15.6 and IEEE802.15.4f workgroups along with the proposed 368-369 ECMA specifications open new roads to optimize performance in ultrawideband (UWB) communication links and services. In this perspective, new communications require high reliability, high throughput for multimedia content delivery, very low latency, and bit error rates are required. In this regard, this contribution deals with a turbo-like mechanism that, starting from an interference acquisition phase, proceeds with data-aided channel estimation and synchronization to data detection of ultrawideband impulse-radio (UWB-IR) terminals operating over broadband channels affected by multipath fading and in the presence of imperfect orthogonal access. The performance of the proposed transceiver has been evaluated in terms of both required number of pilot symbols for the channel estimation/data synchronization and bit error rate resulting from the channel estimation and interference analysis. Moreover, the performance related to system efficiency (i.e., data transmitted with respect to the whole information needed for estimation purposes) is evaluated by showing the balance between achieved transmission rate and bit error rate. Numerical comparisons have been performed as well as tests on real data and partial implementation of the proposed scheme.