The University of British Columbia

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for the analysis of the impact of ultra-wideband (UWB) interference on systems that use the popular combination of bit- interleaved coded modulation (BICM) and orthogonal frequency- division multiplexing (OFDM). For the UWB interference we consider multi-band OFDM (MB-OFDM), direct-sequence UWB (DS-UWB), and impulse-radio UWB (IR-UWB) formats following recent IEEE/ECMA standards and standard proposals. Our analysis is applicable to generic BICM-OFDM victim systems including IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), IEEE 802.16 wireless access systems (WiMAX), and 4th generation mobile communication systems. Besides the exact analysis we also calculate the bit-error rate for the case when the UWB interference is modeled as additional Gaussian noise. Our results show that in general the BER of the BICM-OFDM system strongly depends on the type of the UWB interference and the sub-carrier spacing. While the Gaussian approximation is very accurate for DS-UWB, it may severely over- or underestimate the true BER for MB-OFDM and IR-UWB interference.