Recently there has been a significant amount of interest in the area of wideband and ultra-wideband (UWB) signaling for use in indoor wireless systems. This interest is in part motivated by the notion that the use of large bandwidth signals makes systems less sensitive to the degrading effects of multipath propagation. By reducing the sensitivity to multipath, more robust and higher capacity systems can be realized. However, as signal bandwidth is increased, the complexity of a Rake receiver (or other receiver structure) required to capture the available power also increases. In addition, accurate channel estimation is required to realize this performance, which becomes increasingly difficult as energy is dispersed among more multipath components.

In this thesis we quantify the channel response for six signal bandwidths ranging from continuous wave (CW) to 1 GHz transmission bandwidths. We present large scale and small scale fading statistics for both LOS and NLOS indoor channels based on an indoor measurement campaign conducted in Durham Hall at Virginia Tech. Using newly developed antenna positioning equipment we also quantify the spatial correlation of these signals. It is shown that the incremental performance gains due to reduced fading of large bandwidths level off as signals approach UWB bandwidths. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of Rake receivers for the different signal bandwidths and compare their performance for binary phase modulation (BPSK). It is shown that the receiver structure and performance is critical in realizing the reduced fading benefit of large signal bandwidths. We show practical channel estimation degrades performance more for larger bandwidths. We also demonstrate for a fixed finger Rake receiver there is an optimal signal bandwidth beyond which increased signal bandwidth produces degrading results.