TH-CDMA-PPM with noncoherent detection for low rate WPAN

Ultra wideband (UWB) impulse radio (IR) is a prospective transmission technology for low-rate indoor communications, as described in the physical-layer proposals for IEEE 802.15.4a wireless personal area networks (WPAN). Time hopping (TH) code division multiple access (CDMA) is considered as an access scheme for multiuser UWB-IR systems. The TH-CDMA system widely addressed in the literature adopts binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) with coherent detection, which requires accurate channel estimation and thus increasing the implementation complexity. In this correspondence, we suggest using TH-CDMA-PPM (pulse position modulation) with non-coherent detection to simplify the receiver structure. The influence of different combinations of TH and CDMA processing gains on error performance of the new scheme is analyzed and numerical results are presented for illustration.