An Exact Framework for Performance Analysis of IR–UWB Systems: The Need for Approximations

In this letter, we propose an exact analytical framework for analyzing the performance of impulse radio (IR) ultra wide band (UWB) receiver architectures. In particular, the framework can handle i. various multipath fading distributions, ii. correlated fading, iii. channel sparseness, iv. time overlap among multipath components (MPCs), i.e., intra-pulse interference and v. both all-rake and transmitted-reference (TR) receiver architectures. The proposed methodology is based on estimating the characteristic function (CF) of the signal-to- noise ratio at the receiver, which can be reduced to a quadratic form of a random vector.