BER Performance and Data Throughput of Sinusoidal Template-Based Impulse-Radio Ultra Wideband Receivers for Wireless Body Area Networks

Windowed sinusoidal template-based correlator receivers are good candidates for high-data rate low-power Ultra Wideband (UWB) systems. Their performance approaches the performance of optimal detectors and provides low-power consumption. However, the ultra short pulses of UWB technology makes it sensitive to timing-errors. In this paper, the Bit-Error-Rate (BER) performance and maximum allowable data throughput of Equally-Correlated Pulse Position Modulation (EC-PPM) modulation scheme in the presence of timing-jitter are studied and compared for low-power sinusoidal template based correlator receivers. Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), Nakagami-m fading, industrially accepted on-body IEEE 802.15.6a and actual on-body channels are considered. Numerical results show that the maximum SNR penalty when using sinusoidal templates is ≈ 2 dB for the same BER and the corresponding data-throughput degradation is 5 Mbps.