VDM Syed, I: Channel Shortening Equalizers for UWB Rake Receiver

UWB systems occupy large bandwidths with very low power spectral densities. This feature makes UWB channels highly rich in multipaths. To exploit the temporal diversity, a UWB receiver usually incorporates Rake reception. Each multipath in the channel carries just a fraction of the signal energy. This phenomenon dictates a Rake receiver with a large number of fingers to achieve a good performance. Eventually, the Rake structure becomes very complex from analysis and design perspectives and expensive too. This book proposes channel shortening or time domain equalization as a technique to reduce the complexity of the UWB Rake receiver. It begins with the definition of channel shortening and provides a summary of the existing channel shortening equalizer (CSE) designs and their limitations. Consequently, this book presents several CSE designs to reduce the UWB Rake receiver complexity. A detalied performance analysis of the proposed designs indicates that the CSEs can play a significant role in designing a simple and cost effective Rake receiver for UWB systems. This book should be useful to the research students exploring new CSE designs and applications.