Soft-Output Sphere Decoder for Multiple-Symbol Differential Detection of Impulse-Radio Ultra-Wideband

TL;DR

This paper introduces a soft-output sphere decoder for multiple-symbol differential detection in IR-UWB systems, enhancing power efficiency and reliability with moderate complexity increase over traditional methods.

Contribution

It combines soft-output MSDD with a single-tree-search sphere decoder, improving performance in IR-UWB systems compared to conventional detection methods.

Findings

Improved detection performance over hard-output MSDD

Moderate complexity increase with soft-output implementation

Enhanced power efficiency in IR-UWB systems

Abstract

Power efficiency of noncoherent receivers for impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) transmission systems can significantly be improved, on the one hand, by employing multiple-symbol differential detection (MSDD), and, on the other hand, by providing reliability information to the subsequent channel decoder. In this paper, we combine these two techniques. Incorporating the computation of the soft information into a single-tree-search sphere decoder (SD), the application of this soft-output MSDD in a typical IR-UWB system imposes only a moderate complexity increase at, however, improved performance over hard-output MSDD, and in particular, over conventional symbol-by-symbol noncoherent differential detection.