Abstract: The lower complexity is an outstanding advantage of impulse radio ultra wideband(UWB) communication due to traditional carrier free. Both better performance and a simple receiver structure are the UWI3 system design goals. A novel demodulation algorithm for UWI3 signal reception based on amplitude comparison was proposed. The pulse amplitudes were obtained by integrating positive and negative half cycle of the pulse respectively at special posilion in pulse position modulation scheme, and then the binary symbol was demodulated by comparing their amplitudes.The receiver can get a better balance between reception performance and system complexity by using this method. The results show that the proposed method can remarkably obtain better bit error ratio performanee(over 5dB) than the square law detection with a little expense of complexity, and reduce complexity in comparison with coherent detection but less than 2dB performance degradation.

Key words: Ultra-widcband, Amplitude comparison, Square law detection, Coherent detection