1720 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 54, NO.
10, OCTOBER 2006
Performance of an Ultra-Wideband Communication System in the Presence of
Narrowband BPSK- and QPSK-Modulated OFDM Interference
Bo Hu, Member, IEEE, and Norman C. Beaulieu, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—An analysis is derived for calculating the bit-error
probability of an ultra-wideband (UWB) communication system
operating with binary phase-shift keying and quaternary
phase-shift keying narrowband interference in additive white
Gaussian noise. The analytical expressions are valid when phase
transitions of the interfering symbols can be ignored. The accuracy
of the Gaussian approximation is assessed, and several modulation
schemes proposed for UWB communication are evaluated in terms
of capability of interference suppression.
Index Terms—Interference, multiaccess communication,
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), ultra-wide-
band (UWB), wireless.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has re-
cently introduced restrictions on the power spectral den-
sity (PSD) of ultra-wideband (UWB) systems [1]. This specifi-
cation reduces the potential for interference to other coexisting
wireless user systems. Since the PSD of conventional commu-
nication signals is much higher than that of UWB signals, the
interference from other wireless applications to UWB systems
becomes more severe and critical. Therefore, the performance
of UWB signals in the presence of interference from other com-
munication systems in the same frequency band must be care-
fully investigated before commercial applications. As a result,
the performance of UWB in the presence of various narrow-
band interference (NBI) was studied in [2]–[5]. All these re-
sults were obtained using simplified models of real interference,
owing to the difficulty of the analysis for more accurate models.
An expression for evaluating the bit-error rate (BER) perfor-
mance of a time-hopping pulse position modulation (TH-PPM)
system corrupted by interference from orthogonal frequency-di-
vision multiplexing (OFDM) signals was developed in [6], in
which a Gaussian approximation was used for modeling binary
phase-shift keying (BPSK) OFDM interference. However, pub-
lished work [7] has shown that Gaussian approximations may
sometimes be inaccurate in UWB applications.
In this letter, we provide an analysis for the performance of
different UWB systems operating in additive white Gaussian
noise (AWGN) in the presence of BPSK and quadrature PSK
(QPSK) OFDM interference, accurate when the phase transi-
tions of the interfering signals can be ignored; such is the case
Paper approved by A. Zanella, the Editor for Wireless Systems of the IEEE
Communications Society. Manuscript received September 14, 2004; revised
February 4, 2006 and March 29, 2006. This paper was presented in part at the
IEEE International Conference on Communications, Seoul, South Korea, May
2005
The authors are with Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2V4, Canada (e-mail: bohu@ee.ual-
berta.ca; beaulieu@ee.ualberta.ca).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCOMM.2006.881338
0090-6778/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
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when the symbol duration of the interfering signals is much
greater than the bit duration of the UWB system. Particularly,
PPM and BPSK using TH or direct sequence (DS) are con-
sidered. A closed-form expression for the interference can be
obtained without using any bandlimited Gaussian assumption
or approximation, for UWB systems employing pulse-shaping
for which the inverse Fourier transform exists. We consider
only BPSK and QPSK interference for brevity and clarity, but
the analysis can be extended to all quadrature modulations
for which the in-phase and quadrature data streams can be
demodulated independently. We also investigate the accuracy
of the Gaussian approximation, and show that the Gaussian
approximation for BPSK OFDM interference is not reliable,
contrary to the conclusions drawn in [6].
II. SYSTEM MODELS
Assume users are transmitting on an AWGN channel in
the presence of narrowband BPSK or QPSK OFDM interfer-
ence. The received signal at the UWB receiver is written as
(1)
where is additive noise with two-sided PSD ,
can be TH-PPM, TH-BPSK, or DS-BPSK signals. The signal
formats of TH-PPM, TH-BPSK, and DS-BPSK are those de-
scribed in [7]. The set represents the received signal
amplitudes, and represent time shifts (delays) for
UWB signals. Additionally, and represents the received am-
plitude and the time shift of the NBI signal , respec-
tively.
We focus on the investigation of interference from narrow-
band BPSK and QPSK OFDM signals. These interfering signals
could be the lower data-rate formats in an IEEE 802.11a system
employing OFDM. Our restriction to BPSK and QPSK permits
a tractable analytical study. We assume that the symbol duration
of the interfering signals is much greater than the bit duration of
the UWB system, which is common in practical systems. There-
fore, phase transitions of the BPSK/QPSK OFDM signal can be
neglected, and the transmitted OFDM signal can be written as
(2)
where is the number of subcarriers in the OFDM signal,
represents the subcarrier frequency spacing, is the carrier fre-
quency, and is the transmitted data symbol, which can rep-
resent BPSK and QPSK.
 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 54, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2006 1721

III. INTERFERENCE ANALYSIS where represents a time-normalization factor, and is intro-

duced to normalize the energy of the pulses, . Our ana-
A. TH-UWB lytical method, however, can be generalized to UWB systems
using other pulses as long as their inverse Fourier transforms
Define the correlation of the template
exist, with the adoption of numerical integration.
with the UWB pulse as
For the second-order Gaussian monocycle, the integral
can be calculated as

(3)

where is the time shift associated with binary PPM.

The decision statistic of the correlation receiver is obtained as (7)
, where is a Gaussian
random variable (RV) with variance ,
is the desired signal component, (8)
is the total multiple-access interference (MAI), and
is the interference from the OFDM signal, given by Therefore, has a closed-form expression as

(9)

where is defined as
(4)

where is the real part of . Defining

and substituting into (4) yields [6] (10)
for BPSK signaling, where takes with equal proba-
bility. Similarly, the expression for can be obtained for
QPSK signaling as

(5)
(11)
where the second equality comes from left-shifting the pulse
in which and represents the in-phase and quadrature parts
to create a symmetric pulse , which has the identical
of the data symbol , respectively, having values chosen from
shape to with pulse width , but is symmetric about .
independently. As seen, for OFDM QPSK sig-
Defining
naling can be regarded as the sum of two independent BPSK
signals.
Considering the uniform distribution of the symbol and
letting represent expectation, we can calculate the charac-
teristic function (CF) of conditioned on and as [8]

and considering the pulse is limited on , we

can approximate the integral by changing the integration
interval to . Then can be interpreted as the in-
verse Fourier transform of , and we can conclude that the
interference from the OFDM signal has a closed-form (12)
expression, as long as the inverse Fourier transform of ex-
ists. Assuming are independent, and using the uniform
We restrict our analysis of UWB systems to the second-order distribution of on , we can express the CF of
Gaussian monocycle, given by conditioned on as [8]

(6) (13)

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 1722 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 54, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2006

Owing to the independence of , the CF of the OFDM TABLE I

interference, , when conditioned on , is [8] PARAMETERS OF THE EXAMPLE TH/DS-UWB AND OFDM SYSTEMS

(14)

Note that (14) is a closed-form expression for the CF of

when the interfering OFDM signal is synchronized to
the desired UWB signal, i.e., . When the OFDM signal is
not transmitted simultaneously with the reference UWB signal,
, the conditional CF of , needs to be averaged
over . Without loss of generality, assume that the time shift
is uniformly distributed on a bit duration of the UWB signal
. Then, the CF of the OFDM interference to the
TH-PPM system in the asynchronous scenario is given by C. Bit-Error Probability
Owing to the symmetry of the OFDM interference, the MAI,
and the noise, the average probability of error for the UWB
(15) system is given by

Similar to the analysis described, we can also obtain the CF (20)

of conditioned on in the TH-BPSK system as
where is the signal component, is AWGN, and represents
the MAI.
Considering the relationship between the cumulative distri-
bution function (CDF) and the CF of an RV, we can calculate
the average probability of error for the desired user in the UWB
(16) systems as

and the CF of the OFDM interference in TH-BPSK is calculated

by averaging across . (21)

B. DS-UWB where is the CF for the noise term , and

A DS-BPSK UWB signal can be expressed as [7] and is the CF of the interference from the OFDM signal
and the MAI from interfering UWB signals, respectively.

(17) IV. NUMERICAL RESULTS AND COMPARISONS

We use our analytical results to study the average BER per-
where is the number of chips per information bit. The signal formance of TH-UWB and DS-UWB in the presence of IEEE
component in the decision statistic for the DS-UWB system is 802.11a BPSK/QPSK OFDM interference. The parameters of
, and is the interference to the the example UWB systems and the OFDM system are listed in
DS-BPSK system from the OFDM signal, expressed as Table I.
Fig. 1 shows the BERs of a TH-BPSK system operating with
BPSK/QPSK OFDM interference. In the Gaussian approxima-
(18)
tion, the expression for the signal-to-interference-plus-noise
ratio (SINR) is given by
where .
Following similar steps as those employed in the analysis of
TH-UWB systems, we obtain the CF of the total interference
(22)
in the DS-UWB system as

where the variance of the OFDM interference, , can

be obtained from (9) and (18). The BER curves are presented
as a function of signal-to-noise power ratio (SNR) with
. For BPSK OFDM interference, we observe that the the-
(19) oretical results obtained from the precise analysis and the test
simulation results are in excellent agreement. It is also seen that
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 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 54, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2006 1723

Fig. 1. Average BER versus SNR of the TH-BPSK UWB system operating Fig. 2. Average BER versus SNR of the DS-BPSK UWB system operating
with BPSK/QPSK OFDM interference with A=A =
0 dB. with BPSK OFDM interference for different A=A values.

the Gaussian approximation is in good agreement with the anal-

ysis only for small and medium SNR values, say SNR 10 dB,
when . However, the Gaussian approximation underes-
timates the BERs by an order of magnitude when the SNR is
16 dB. Unlike the analytical results, which show that the perfor-
mance for is better than the performance for ,
and again better for , the Gaussian approximation pro-
vides the same BERs for , and fails to predict the
BER performance improvement achieved by using larger values
of . On the other hand, we note that the exact BER curves be-
come increasingly closer to the BER curves obtained from the
Gaussian approximation as the length of the repetition code
increases. This observation can be explained as follows. Con-
sidering the expression for the OFDM interference in (9), we
can see that more interfering terms will contribute to as
increases. Owing to the near independence between these
terms, the total interference can be well-approximated Fig. 3. Comparison of the TH-PPM, TH-BPSK, and DS-BPSK systems with
as a Gaussian RV for large values of following a central the same data rate operating in BPSK OFDM interference.
limit theorem (CLT). It appears that the Gaussian approxima-
tion is valid for estimating the BER of the TH-BPSK system
operating with BPSK OFDM interference for large values of approximation is in excellent agreement with the CF analysis
, but it underestimates the BERs for large values of SNR and for all values of SNR. This behaviour can also be explained
small values of . Also, when the TH-BPSK system is oper- using a CLT. Checking the expression for in (18) for
ating with QPSK OFDM interference, the Gaussian approxima- the DS-UWB system, we note that many more terms than is the
tion provides accurate BER estimates for all SNR values con- case in TH-UWB systems contribute to the total interference
sidered, and does not show the differences for small values of when we use to normalize the DS-UWB system.
seen in the BPSK case. This is explained by the fact that In this case, the OFDM interference more closely approximates
the convergence to the normal distribution is faster in the QPSK a Gaussian-distributed RV, and the Gaussian approximation is
case than in the BPSK case, because the QPSK case has more highly accurate for estimating the BER. In consequence, as
levels. long as the value of is large enough to make the interference
Fig. 2 shows the performance of the DS-BPSK UWB system AWGN-like, the BER performance will no longer be improved
in the presence of BPSK OFDM interference. In order to by using a longer repetition code. These results corroborate the
fairly compare the BER performance of DS-UWB systems, we observations obtained from Fig. 1 for large values of . In
assume that the same data rate is used for all TH contrast to the behaviour of UWB systems in the presence of
and DS systems, which requires [7]. In this figure, MAI, as obtained in [7], increasing the length of the repetition
the Gaussian approximation provides almost the same BER code will not suppress more narrowband OFDM interference,
estimates for different values of . However, unlike the results and the UWB system performance will not be improved,
seen in Fig. 1 for BPSK OFDM interference, the Gaussian when the value of or is large enough that the Gaussian
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 1724 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS, VOL. 54, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2006

and large SNR values when . Note that DS-BPSK

and TH-BPSK achieve the same BER performance when the
interference closely follows the Gaussian distribution as in-
creases. Fig. 4 shows the BERs of these systems operating with
QPSK OFDM interference. Unlike the result observed in Fig. 3,
where DS-BPSK outperforms TH-BPSK for large SNR values
with small , DS-BPSK and TH-BPSK achieve similar BERs
for all SNR values with arbitrary values of when corrupted
by QPSK OFDM interference. Again, it appears that conver-
gence to the normal distribution happens sooner for QPSK than
BPSK.
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