JOURNAL OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS, VOLUME 31, ISSUE 2, AUGUST 2015

System Model of TH-UWB Using LDPC Code

Implementation
M. Marjanovi-Jakovljevi
Abstract A Low-Density Parity- Check (LDPC) code is an error-correcting code in a noisy-channel transmission that closely
approaches the Shannon limit, also called channel capacity. Time Hopping-Ultra Wideband (TH-UWB) is a relatively new
technology that might have a huge impact on improving wireless communications. Since that current TH-UWB systems apply
convolutional codes as their channel coding scheme, it is very usefull to investigate LDPC codes performance for those
systems. This paper presents a mathematical model in order to simulate TH-UWB systems with LDPC code implementation.
Using this implementation, it is shown that for low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) in the real multipath channel environment, the
-3
difference between LDPC coded and non-coded system is negligible, but for BER=10 , the gain of the coded system compared
to the non-coded system is approximately 4 dB. Owing to this implementation, in this accurate and flexible system model, BER
performance of a TH-UWB System in different scenarios is presented and good performance in terms of BER versus SNR is
achieved. An additional result is the validation of the simulated results with performance formula for TH-UWB systems when
LDPC is implemented.

Index Terms TH-UWB, LDPC codes, Multiuser interference (MUI), BER, Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN).

1 INTRODUCTION
TH-UWB technology, introduced in [1], [2] and [3], presents some very attractive features for future indoor wireless systems in terms of achievable transmission rate and
multiple access capabilities. Thus, it is very important and
useful to continuously work on performance improvement of those systems.
TH-UWB systems, as any other system, deal with the
problems with signal transmission over a noisy communication channel. The job of the encoder and decoder is to
transmit information about the source across the noisy
channel. Numerous studies have attempted to obtain the
minimum channel capacity, needed to almost surely asymptotically observe and stabilize the system [4].
In [5] it is demonstrated that coding techniques for noisy
channels have near optimal performance in wireless systems. Therefore, a comprehensive description of the coding techniques, including convolution, trellis, concatenated, turbo and LDPC codes is given.
The Noisy Channel Coding Theorem is discovered by C.
E. Shannon [6] in order to reduce error rate on noisy
channels to negligible levels without affecting the data
rates. In order to reach BER performance close to the
Shannon limit, in [7] the low density parity check codes
were developed by Robert Gallegar.
Current TH-UWB systems apply convolution codes as
their channel coding scheme. Thus, it is very usefull to
investigate LDPC codes performance for TH-UWB.
Based on this accurate and flexible model, a description
on how to simulate system in a multipath environment

M. Marjanovi-Jakovljevi is Associate Professor at Singidunum Universitz, Belgrade, Serbia.

through employing RAKE receiver [5] is presented. Additionally, the TH-UWB system model with LDPC code
implementation is described and the influence of LDPC
codes on TH-UWB system performance is presented. The
impact of different factors on TH-UWB system performance over AWGN channel is shown.
Section II describes the system and signal model used
for the purposes of this paper. Sections III and IV elaborate on the implementation of LDPC coding and decoding
schemes into this system model. In Section V, the theoretical value of Error Probability of LDPC decoding in
AWGN is calculated. Section VI depicts simulation results, whereas Sections VII offers conclusions from present work.

2 SYSTEM AND MODEL

2.1 Signal Model
Bit structure of the TH-UWB System for the kth user is
shown in Figure 1. The total number of bits is Nb. Each bit
is subdivided into Nf frames, and each frame is subdivided into Nh chips.
th
Signal transmitted through the k link can be presented
as follows:

s (k ) (t ) =

w (t d ( ) jT
tr

k
j

c (jk )Tc

(1)

j =

where wtr represents the transmitted waveform. In [8],

some possible waveforms have been proposed. In this
work, we select the pulse shaper to be the second derivative of the Gaussian function that has been normalized to
have unit energy. In order to normalize its energy, we
consider that

( j +1)T f

( j +1)T f

wtr2

(
wtr2

(t )dt =

jT f

wrec (t ) = wtr (t ) * hdist (t )

t d (jk ) jT f c (jk )Tc dt = 1 (2)

jT f

where d (jk ) represents a sequence of time-shifts in a PPM

modulation [9].
c (k ) {0,1,..., N }is the orthogonal sequence, where N

{ }
j

h 1

is the integer number that denotes the position within the

frame where the monocycle should be transmitted in order to mitigate the Multi User Interference (MUI) as described in [10]. For the purposes of this paper, we use
pseudorandom TH codes.

(5)

For the sake of simplicity, we consider the perfect channel and signal estimation and the perfect synchronization.
For the same reason, this analyze will be limited on observing the only one symbol transmission. In order to
simulate a UWB system assuming that channel is not perfectly synchronized, synchronization might be achieved,
i.e. as in [11] or [12].

2.3 Receiver
In order to collect multipath energy and to recover the
information, as a general case of receiver, in this simulator, we describe this simulator model using selective
RAKE receiver as it is proposed in [13]. This receiver
gives the correlation between the received signal r(t) and
template signal that should be previously synchronized.
The statistics for the ith frame on the qth receiver is given as
follows:
( i +1)T f + ci( q )Tc

i (t ) =

r (t ) v

( q)

(t iT f ci( q ) Tc )dt (6)

iT f + ci( q )Tc

where v ( q ) (t ) represents the template signal described as

follows:

v ( q ) (t ) =

Lma x

(t )
( q)
m

( q)
m

(7)

m =0

Figure 1. Bit structure of TH-UWB Symbol for the kth user

2.2 Channel Model

The transmitted signal of the kth user through the multipath channel has the following structure:
Nu

r (t ) =

(k )

(t ) * h ( k ) (t ) + n(t )

(3)

k =1

where * denotes the convolution between transmitted

signal s(k)(t) and normalized channel response h(k)(t).
n(t) represents the AWGN with mean zero and a dou-

The signal (t) depends on the type of the modulation

employed. Since we apply the binary PPM, this signal
might be defined as:

(t ) = wrec (t ) wrec (t )

(8)

Lmax represents the number of RAKE fingers with the amplitudes m(q) and the corresponding finger duration
m(q ) . Once the frame statistics has been calculated, a bit
decision should be taken. Supposing that wtr (t ) and
wtr (t ) are orthogonal, soft decision [14] is obtained as

ble-sided power spectral density n2 / 2 .

Considering that multipath channel is parameterized as
a combination of L paths, each characterized by delay

decision = 0, 0,
1, < 0

{ l(k ) } and amplitude { l(k ) }, signal from (3) can be writ-

where the bit statistic for soft decision is presented as

ten as

N u
r (t ) =
k =1

l( k ) wrec (t
l =1 j =

c (jk ) Tc l( k ) + n (t )

Nf

=
d (jk )

jT f

(9)

(10)

i =1

(4)
th

where wrec (t) represents the received pulse of the k user

after the multipath propagation. Received pulse can be
presented as a convolution between the transmitted monocycle and the distorted channel response hdist (t) as

3 PROPOSED MODEL FOR LDPC CODE

IMPLEMENTATION
This chapter addresses the issue of robust and progressive transmission of TH-UWB signals encoded with
LDPC codes over noisy channels. It demonstrates that this

coding technique has near optimal performance in wireless systems close to the Shannon limit [6]. In LDPC encoding, a form of parity-checking is used, where extra bits
are added to the transmission. In this way, the decoder in
receiver enforces the constraint check for each received
bit.
LDPC are codes that are specified by a matrix that contains mostly 0s with few 1s. LDPC codes use paritycheck sparse matrix H with dimensions MXN. Matrix H
can be either regular, meaning that there is a specific
number of 1s per row or per column, or irregular, where
there is no constraint on the number of 1s.

In this paper, we are going to use irregular matrix H, which

means there is no specific number of 1s per row and column. The sparseness of matrix H means that there is a very
low number of 1s in H compared to its total size. Figure 2
presents a block diagram of the system for the kth user. The
matrix H is used to encode a message of codeword d(k ) . The
columns in H correspond to the bits of the transmitted message, and the rows of matrix H correspond to the parity
checks of the codeword. When LDPC are used, the coder
would first take binary sequence and map our transmitted
sequence into a redundant sequence, i.e. codeword.
In this work, we use binary PPM and the vector

d ( k ) = d 1 , d 2 , , d N b 1

contains information on infor-

mation bits. If di=0, transmitted bit is si=0, while when di=1,

transmitted bit is si=1, where i {1,2,..., N b }.

Figure 2. Block diagram of the proposed System model for the kth
user

As an example, in Figure 3, Tanner graph is presented with

its corresponding matrix, where the number of bits is Nb =7.
In general, this paper defines the rate R of the LDPC as a
ratio of the length of the information sequence to the length
of the codeword. Since, we are transmitting a sequence with
N b bits, there are 2 N b possible sequences from the source
that are mapped into n length codeword. Therefore, a fraction 2 n (1 R ) of the 2 n different n length sequences can be
used as codewords.

Figure 3. LDPC Matrix with its corresponding Tanner graph

The parity-check matrix is used to encode an imput message

d. A valid codeword will satisfy Hd=0, where H is MXNb
dimension matrix. M = n(1-R), represents the number of
check bits.
For instance, when a codeword d = {1011} is received, each
check bit performs the binary XOR operation with the
corresponding bit in d (k ) . If all check nodes generate 0, the

codeword is correct. In case of the example shown in the

Figure 3., we obtain the following equations:

C1(k ) = d1(k ) + d 2(k ) + d 4(k ) = 1 1 1 = 1

(11)

C2(k )

(12)

d 2(k )

+ d 3(k )

+ d 5(k )

= 1 0 0 = 1

C3(k ) = d1(k ) + d 2(k ) + d 3(k ) + d 4(k ) + d6(k )

(13)

C3(k ) = 1 1 0 1 1 = 0

(14)

C4(k ) = d 5(k ) + d 6(k ) + d 7(k ) = 1 1 1 = 1

(15)

4 LDPC PARITY CHECK DECODING

In the receiver, the decoder contains knowledge on which
sequences are considered as codewords. Therefore, the receiver is capable of separating the transmitted n length
codeword from the channel noise. As a result, the codeword
is mapped back into the Nb information bits. Numerous decoding schemes were used to decode the codeword. In this
paper, we have used LDPC decoding based on the BitFlipping decoding algorithm [7]. This decoding scheme
takes an intermediate decision and operates with the a posteriori probabilities of the input symbols.
In case shown in Figure 4, we assume that the codeword is
T
T
(k ) ={1111} . Compared to d (k ) ={1011} , which is assumed as a correct codeword, we can see that error is located
in the second bit of the received codeword (k ) .

d)
Steps from a), b) and c) until all parity
checks are zero should be repeated.

5 BER PERFORMANCE OF LDPC CODES IN

AWGN CHANNEL
In (19), a theoretical analysis of the performance of a THUWB systems under certain restrictions is presented,
based on the one presented in [17].
In order to validate our approach, we made comparison
between simulated results and the theoretical response. If
we consider Nu independent users, the MUI can be modeled as Gaussian and the BER for soft decision can be expressed as (18).

We have assumed likelihood receiver which output is given

by (since one of two waveforms is transmitted):

[
Pr [s

]
= 1 r (t ) ]

Pr s ( k ) = 0 r (t )

j = ln

(k )

(16)

In the block diagram in Figure 2, decision block is located

after LDPC decoder. This is because if the output is
converted into binary digit prior to attempting to the block
the data, some information about transmitted sequence
might be destroyed.
If one of the two waveforms is transmitted every T seconds,
these signals appear in the receiver with equal energy.
T

Ec =

x 02 (t )dt = x12 (t )dt

(17)

Let n(t) be a sample of white Gaussian noise of power density n2 = N 0 . Then, the probability of error on the input is

BER = Q SNR ( N u )

(18)

where

(N f
SNR ( N u ) =

Received codeword is (k ) ={1011}T.

b)
For each variable node, the nonzero parity
check sums are counted.
c)
The bit of variable node having the largest
number of nonzero parity check sums is flipped.

Nu

n2 =

(19)

( N

+
f

/ T f ) [ wrec (t s ) (t )dt ]2 ds

k =2

Figure 4. Bit flipping algorithm

a)

rec (t ) ( t )dt )

n2 +

The steps are the following:

4 E c (1 ) 4 RE(1 )
;
=
N0
N0

(20)

and

1
Ec

x 0 (t ) x1 (t )dt =

1
RE

x (t ) x (t )dt
0

(21)

E is available energy per information digit. In [7] it is

1
shown that the rate R =
has the best performance com2
pared to other rates due to time duration of block length and
we have used this value for the purpose of this paper.

information symbols per second. BER curve for the system that is not coded is presented with the solid line, and
the corresponding BER curve of the coded system (for the
same number of users) is presented with the same color
dashed line. It is shown that for BER=10-3, for the same
number of users, the gain of the coded system compared
to the non-coded system is approximately 4 dB.

7 SIMULATION RESULTS

10

10
BER

-2

10

-4

10

-6

10

-8

Theoretical curve for non-coded system

Theoretical curve when LDPC is implemented
Simulated curve for non-coded system
Simulated curve when LDPC is implemented
0

10

12

SNR[dB]

14

16

18

Figure 5. Comparison between the simulated response and the theoretical expression (based on formula (18)) for a PPM-TH-UWB system for LDPC coded and non-coded system in the multipath channel
environment. fs=25e9;tc=1ns;Tf=20ns;Nf=4; Nh=4; Ec=1;R=0.5;

10

10

-2

BER
10

-4

10

-6

10

-8

10

-10

Tf=20n
Tf=40n
s
Tf=60n
s
Tf=80n
s
s 2

10

12

SNR[dB]

14

16

18

Figure 6. Duration of frame influence on BER performance employing Single User Receiver; multipath channel; fs=25e9;tc=1ns; Nf=4;
Nh=4;R=0.5;

-1

10

Second Derivative of the Gaussian Monocycle

Rayleigh Monocycle
Cubic Monocycle

BER

Since an accurate and flexible simulation model is obtained, this chapter analyzes the influence of different
factors (number of users, number of chips, waveform designs, frame duration, LDPC coding influence). Simulation results are obtained using MATLAB Monte Carlo
simulations [15].
In Figure 5, it can be seen how theoretical value describes
exactly the behavior of the simulated response. It is
shown that for low Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) in the
presence of reach multipath environment, the difference
between LDPC coded and non-coded system is negligible,
but for
BER=10-3, the gain of the coded system compared to the
non-coded system is approximately 4 dB. Unfortunately,
the development of a software simulator for UWB has
several difficulties derived from the extremely large sampling rate necessary to process these UWB signals. Since
the length of the array that contains the samples of a single bit can be very large. Therefore, in a real channel multipath environment, in order to achieve low BER, a long
time simulation process is required.
In Figure 6, it is shown how BER performance decreases
as duration of frame increases.
Since, the real TH-UWB channel has large number of multipath components and considering several users, the
necessary computational requirements to evaluate produce high simulation time, especially for low BERs.
Therefore, for the rest of result, we are going to present
simulation curves taking into account AWGN channel.
In Figure 7, monocycle shape influence on BER performance employing Single User Receiver is shown. It is
demonstrated that under the same scenario, the type of
the monocycle does not have a considerable impact on the
system performance. Anyway, for the rest of the results,
we have decided to use the Second Derivative of the
Gaussian Monocycle.
In Figure 8, number of chips influence on BER performance employing Single User Receiver where Nu=64,
Nf=64, fs=200/Tc is presented. The results are expected,
since when the number of chips gets bigger, the performance becomes better. As we have already mentioned in I
section, Nh is the integer number denoting the position
within the frame where the monocycle should be transmitted in order to mitigate the Multi User Interference
(MUI). Since this number is bigger, the MUI is lower and
BER performance is better.
In Figure 9, we have shown the LDPC influence on BER
performance for different number of users. We have con1
sidered two systems, one coded at rate
and other one
2
that is not coded, both transmitting the same
number of

-2

10

-3

10

10

11

12

13

14

SNR

Figure 7. Monocycle Shape Influence on BER performance employing Single User Receiver; AWGN channel; Nu=64, Nh=64, Nf=8,
fs=200/Tc; Ec=1;

(the number of users, waveform design, time-hopping

codes, channel models, multiuser receivers [19]-[22]) and
achieve a low BER in a real time application even in the
presence of reach multipath environment.

10

-1

10

-2

BER

10

REFERENCES

-3

10

Nh=2
Nh=16
Nh=32
Nh=64

-4

10

-5

10

10

11

12

13

14

SNR

Figure 8. Number of Chips Influence on BER performance employing

Single User Receiver; Second Derivative of the Gaussian
Monopulse; AWGN channel; Nu=64, Nf=64, fs=200/Tc;

Figure 9. Low Density Parity Codes influence on BER performance

for different Number of users, employing Single User Receiver; Second Derivative of the Gaussian Monopulse; AWGN channel with
2 = 1; Nf=4, Nh=64, Tc=1ns, fs=250/Tc, R=1/2;

7 CONCLUSION
presents an encoder-decoder design solution, for practical
LDPC coding TH-UWB system implementation.
Computer simulations have shown that the LDPC codes
have significant error-correcting performance in those
systems. We believe that the simulation model of THUWB systems with LDPC design approach will give
communication system designers a unique opportunity to
explore attractive features of TH-UWB Systems in many
real-life applications.
Since the simulation of TH-UWB systems in the multipath
environment requires large sampling rates, our future
work shall mostly be directed towards reducing the simulation time by considering LDPC codes implementation in
Low Complexity Simulation Algorithm described in [16]
and presenting BER performance of TH-UWB systems
using the real channel model from [17] or [18].
With this low complexity simulation model; we
might analyze the performance of the TH-UWB system
and the impact of different factors of TH-UWB systems

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M. Marjanovi Jakovljevi received the Electrical Engineer degree

from Belgrade University, Serbia, in 2002. In 2007. She received
Ph.D. degree in Telecommunications at the Signal Processing Group
of the Polytechnic University de Madrid (UPM). She has been
awarded a Telefonica Moviles Fellowship to the best academic
trajectory. She is currently working as an Associate Professor in the
department of the Computer Engineering at the Singidunum
University in Belgrade. Her research interests include Information
Retreival Systems, UWB systems, ad hoc networks, and wireless
communications.