| The demands for higher data rates in wireless personal area networks have led to the current interest and development of the ultra-wideband (UWB) communication technology. An ultra-wideband (UWB) channel has the potential to provide both low cost and high speed wireless devices with its extensive spectrum resources. However, how to design an efficient, reliable, low complexity transmission technology for UWB channels is still a big question. In this thesis, a novel dual pulse (DP) transmission scheme that improves the data rate of a popular and simple technique called transmitted reference (TR) is proposed. A complete system including the transmitter and receiver for the DP scheme is presented and extensively studied. Three receiver designs based on non-coherent general selection combining (GSC), absolute threshold-GSC (AT-GSC), and normalised threshold-GSC (NT-GSC) of a front-end autocorrelator are proposed and their performances are analysed and simulated thoroughly in UWB channels. Furthermore, an improved version of the DP scheme called improved DP (iDP) is also proposed. The new DP designs offer a range of advantages over the traditional TR system, such as doubled data rate, more immunity to channel variation, less detection delay and ease of implementing delay units, etc., while maintaining similar performance and complexity. |
