Integration Interval Determination in Transmitted Reference Pulse Cluster Systems for UWB Communications

A recently proposed Transmitted Reference Pulse Cluster (TRPC) structure contains compactly spaced reference and data pulses, and enables a low complexity, robust and practical auto-correlation detector to be used at the receiver. TRPC has been shown to outperform the conventional transmitted reference and non-coherent pulse position modulation systems in ultra-wideband channels. Previous research indicated that the integration interval of the auto-correlation detector is critical to the performance of TRPC. In this paper, practical data-aided algorithms are introduced to determine the integration interval of the TRPC structure based on minimizing the system bit error rate.