TABLE OF CONTENTS In this chapter, practical issues for UWB system design are investigated. First, design of UWB signals for ranging applications is considered, and selection of various signal parameters, such as pulse repetition interval and bandwidth, is studied. Then, link budget calculations are performed in order to determine signal quality as a function of distance. Compared to narrowband systems, the large bandwidth of UWB systems introduces additional challenges for the design of certain system components. Therefore, hardware issues for UWB transmitters and receivers are investigated, and the design of power amplifiers, antennas, low-noise amplifiers and analog-to-digital converters is studied for UWB systems.
Design of a ranging system requires careful selection of system parameters in order to optimize system performance under practical and regulatory constraints. In a ranging system, the main performance criteria are the ranging accuracy and the amount of time to perform ranging; i.e. ranging time.
The ranging accuracy can be quantified by means of mean absolute error (MAE), which is defined as the expected value of the absolute value of the error; i.e.
where 
is the range estimate and d is the true range. In a practical scenario, the expected value in (8.1) is approximated by the sample mean of the absolute error:
where d i and 
are, respectively, the true range and the range estimate for the ith measurement, for i = 1, , N, with N denoting the number of...
