Scarcely populated UWB-IR systems with interleaved coding-modulation on multipath fading channels

Interleaved coding-modulation (ICM) is a recently proposed method for ultra-wideband impulse radio (UWB-IR) systems. ICM exploits the concept of chip interleaving, allowing to alleviate the problem of inter-symbol and inter-pulse interference commonly present in high data rate UWB-IR systems. In this paper, previous work on ICM is extended to scarcely populated multi-user scenarios. A novel design of a deterministic chip interleaver based on time-hopping hyperbolic congruence sequences is proposed. Furthermore, the main parameters of the random and hyperbolic interleavers are reviewed. The obtained results indicate that the proposed type of interleaver yields similar performance to random interleavers but with the advantage of simpler implementation.