Abstract:

This paper considers signaling schemes for heterogeneous ultrawideband communications networks that contain both coherent (rake) and transmitted-reference (TR) receivers. While coherent receivers are capable of receiving TR signals, they do so with a 3 dB penalty, because they cannot make use of the energy invested into the reference pulse. We propose a new signaling scheme that avoids this drawback, by encoding redundant information on the reference pulse. The resulting scheme does not affect the operation of a TR receiver, while recovering the 3 dB penalty and furthermore providing an additional 1.7 dB coding gain to a coherent uncoded binary scheme. This can be explained by interpreting the scheme as a trellis-coded modulation. We also provide an alternative implementation that can be viewed as a recursive systematic convolutional encoder. Combining this version further with a simple forward error correction encoder results in a concatenated code that can be decoded iteratively, providing a bit-error rate of 10-3 at 2.8 dB signal-to-noise ratio in additive white Gaussian noise. The convergence behavior of this iterative code is analyzed by using extrinsic information transfer charts.