Non-Coherent UWB Communication in the Presence of Multiple Narrowband Interferers

There has been an emerging interest in non-coherent ultra-wide bandwidth (UWB) communications, particularly for low-data rate applications because of its low-complexity and low-power consumption. However, the presence of narrowband (NB) interference severely degrades the communication performance since the energy of the interfering signals is also collected by the receiver. In this paper, we compare the performance of two non-coherent UWB receiver structures - the autocorrelation receiver (AcR) and the energy detection receiver (EDR) - in terms of the bit error probability (BEP). The AcR is based on the transmitted reference signaling with binary pulse amplitude modulation, while the EDR is based on the binary pulse position modulation. We analyze the BEPs for these two non-coherent systems in a multipath fading channel, both in the absence and presence of NB interference. We consider two cases: a) single NB interferer, where the interfering node is located at a fixed distance from the receiver, and b) multiple NB interferers, where the interfering nodes with the same carrier frequency are scattered according to a spatial Poisson process. Our framework is simple enough to enable a tractable analysis and provide insights that are of value in the design of practical UWB systems subject to interference.