Simple performance enhancement technique for frequency hopped multi-band ultra-wideband communications receiver

The multi-band (MB) ultra-wideband (UWB) communication system divides its available frequency spectrum in 3.1 to 10.6 GHz into 16 sub-bands, which leads to inherent disparities between carrier frequencies of each subband. For instance, the highest carrier frequency is 2.65 times higher than the lowest one. Since the propagation loss is proportional to the square of the transmission frequency, the propagation loss on the sub-band having the highest carrier frequency is approximately 7 times larger than that on the sub-band having the lowest carrier frequency, which results in disparities between received signal powers on each sub-band. In this paper, we propose a novel correlation scheme for frequency hopping (FH) MB UWB communications, where the correlation time is adaptively adjusted relative to the sub-band, which reduces the disparity between the received signal energies on each sub-band. Such compensation for lower received powers on sub-bands having higher carrier frequency leads to an improvement on the total average bit error rate (BER) of the entire FH MB UWB communication system. We analyze the performance of the proposed correlation scheme in Nakagami fading channels, and it is shown that the performance gain provided by the proposed correlator is more significant as the Nakagami fading index m increases (i.e., better channel conditions).