Performance analysis of UWB impulse radio with timing jitter

UWB impulse radio communications can provide multi-path diversity when a rake receiver is used. The narrow time domain pulse can effectively combat the fading. Perfect pulse synchronisation is, however, required to obtain optimum performance. For a correlation receiver, small timing jitter between the reference pulse and the received pulse causes performance degradation. Analytical results for the performance degradation caused by timing jitter can be combined with a suitable channel fading probability distribution function to form a combined probability distribution for the received signal power at the output of the correlator. This paper analyses the statistical distribution of the received power at the output of a correlation receiver for a single pulse with timing jitter. By treating the power degradation due to timing jitter as a mathematical equivalence, it is shown that path diversity combining can be a potential technique to mitigate the timing jitter as well as the multi-path fading.