Patent ID: 8213491

Claim:
A method of non-coherent ultrawideband communication, the method comprising: receiving, by a receiver, a received signal comprising an ultrawideband signal and noise, the ultrawideband signal comprising a plurality of transmitted symbols, a multipath delay and having a predetermined pulse-to-pulse duration, the transmitted symbols received at a plurality of parallel correlators; correlating the ultrawideband signal with a delayed version of the ultrawideband signal using the plurality of parallel correlators to produce a correlated signal; integrating the correlated signal utilizing a plurality of parallel integrators to establish a plurality of integrator outputs, each of the plurality of parallel integrators having a predetermined adaptable integration interval, the adaptable integration interval of each of the plurality of parallel integrators being adapted to cover a portion of the multipath delay of the ultrawideband signal; sampling the integrator outputs and averaging the sampled outputs to provide a plurality of power estimates of the ultrawideband signal; estimating a noise power of an ultrawideband channel from the power estimates of the ultrawideband signal; estimating a maximum excess delay of the ultrawideband channel from the power estimates of the ultrawideband signal; and combining the sampled integrator outputs based upon the estimated maximum excess delay of the ultrawideband channel and the estimated noise power of the ultrawideband channel to identify the plurality of transmitted symbols.