Abstract
Ultra Wide-Band (UWB) technology has recently attracted much research interest due to its appealing features in short-range mobile communications. These features include high-data rates, low power consumption, multiple-access communications and precise positioning capabilities. Space-Time Coding (STC) techniques, such as block coding and trellis coding, are known to be simple and practical ways to increase both the spectral efficiency and the capacity in wireless communications. The the- sis aims at designing robust and efficient space-time coding schemes well adapted to single-band UWB signalling. Thus, this work incorporates a fine analysis of a stan- dard Single Input Single Output (SISO) single-band UWB system, scrutinising every important aspect of this system including transceiver structure, channel modelling, multiple-access techniques and detection process. Research also leads to the deriva- tion of a novel closed-form approximation for the average probability of bit-error for single-band UWB systems. This in-depth study highlights drawbacks inherent to UWB systems such as time-jitter effects or rake-receiver complexity and proposes schemes that benefit from spatial diversity to mitigate these problems. Thus, the thesis concentrates on the design of new multiple-antenna space-time coding systems tailored for UWB communications. As a result, this work derives and generates gen- eralised full-rate space-time block codes based on orthogonal pulses to capture both spatial and multipath diversities. Space-time trellis coded modulation is then revis- ited to further improve the spectral efficiency limit and to deliver the high-data rates promised by UWB technology. A new version of space-time trellis coding is developed for the peculiar UWB signalling structure. Finally, thanks to a novel closed-form ap- proximation, a theoretical comparison is undertaken between any SISO-UWB system and the multiple-antenna UWB systems proposed in this thesis. The results clearly underline the impact of STC on a single-band UWB system in terms of enhanced robustness against timing-jitter effects, higher spectral efficiency and capacity im- provement. These advantages are finally confirmed through the numerical evaluation of the error-rate performance.