Effect and Compensation of Colored Timing Jitter in Pulsed UWB Systems

Ultra-wideband (UWB) systems impose a stringent requirement on the jitter performance of the system clock. So far, only the effect of white Gaussian timing jitter has been considered in the literature via numerical simulation. However, practical clocks commonly exhibit colored jitter. In this paper, we first investigate the bit error rate (BER) performance of a single-user binary pulse position modulation UWB system subjected to white and colored Gaussian jitter. It is shown that colored jitter degrades BER performance much more than white jitter, and the extent of degradation increases as the jitter bandwidth decreases. Motivated by this result, we then propose a new jitter compensation scheme to improve the BER performance under colored jitters with small jitter bandwidth, in which each information-bearing data symbol is coupled with a pilot symbol. The proposed scheme attempts to track first the jitter for the current pilot symbol by making use of the pulse-template correlation function. This information is then used together with the known clock jitter bandwidth and jitter root-mean-square (RMS) value to detect the current data symbol according to the maximum likelihood criterion. Simulation results show that the algorithm is effective in improving the BER performance for colored jitters with small jitter bandwidth.