Patent ID: 7349458

Claim:
A linear receiver for a time-hopped impulse radio system in which each symbol is transmitted over a channel having different multipath components as a set of N f frames, each frame including one pulse, comprising: means for sampling all frames of a received signal corresponding to the symbol to generate N f ×L samples, where L is a number of samples for each frame; and means for combining the N f ×L samples according to a minimum mean square error criterion to obtain a decision variable corresponding to the symbol, in which the means for combining further comprises: means for selecting adaptively between equal gain combining and maximum ratio combining, in which the equal gain combining first combines the L samples of each frame according to an equal gain criterion to generate N f combined samples, and the N f combined samples are then recombined according to the minimum mean square error criterion to obtain the decision variable corresponding to the symbol, and in which the maximum ratio combining first combines samples of multipath components of each of the N f frames according to a maximum ratio gain criterion to generate combined samples, and the combined samples are then recombined according to the minimum mean square error criterion to obtain the decision variable corresponding to the symbol.