Non-coherent detection of impulse radio UWB signals based on fourth order statistics

Low-complex and low power non-coherent energy detector (ED) is interesting for low data rate impulse radio (IR) ultra wideband (UWB) systems but, compared to coherent receivers, it suffers from a loss in performance due to low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the detector. In addition, the performance of an ED strongly depends on the integration interval (window size) of the integrator and the window position. A non-coherent kurtosis detector (KD) and a fourth-order detector (FD), which can discriminate between Gaussian noise signals and non-Gaussian IR-UWB signals by directly
estimating the fourth-order moment of the received signal, are presented. The performance of the detectors is evaluated using real channels measured in a corridor, an office and a laboratory environment. The results
show that bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the proposed KD receiver is better than the ED receiver only under certain conditions, while the FD receiver is slightly better than the ED in low SNR region and its performance improves as the SNR increases. In addition, the performance of the FD receiver is less sensitive to overestimation of the integration interval
making it relatively robust to variations of the channel delay spread. Finally, a criteria for the selection of integration time of the proposed detector is suggested.