Low-Complexity Multiuser Detectors for Time-Hopping Impulse-Radio Systems

Impulse radio (IR) and especially time-hopping IR (TH-IR) systems have attracted considerable attention since their introduction in the context of ultra wide-band (UWB) systems in the early 1990s. Recently, with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission actions allowing for the wide-spread use of UWB radio systems, the interest in these systems has grown further. These systems promise to deliver high data rates in multiple access communication channels with very simple transmitter and receiver designs. The importance of multiuser detection for achieving high data rates with these systems has already been established in several studies. This paper studies several low-complexity multiuser detectors specifically designed for TH-IR radio systems. It is demonstrated that many multiuser detectors developed primarily for direct-sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems can be used essentially without any change in TH-IR receivers. Further, several novel, low-complexity multiuser detectors that exploit the special signal structure used for transmission by TH-IR systems are developed. These novel detectors are analyzed both theoretically and via simulations. It is shown that a very simple iterative multiuser detector yields performance that is similar to that of a single-user system.