Time-Reversal Wideband Communications

With the advance of semiconductor technologies, the performance of analog-to-digital converter (ADC) has been improved a lot during the past decade in terms of both sampling rate and resolution. The cost has gone down dramatically that makes the wideband communication much affordable. Under such circumstances, a natural question to ask is: Is there a low complexity high energy-efficient solution to high throughput wideband communications? In this letter, we explore this question by studying time-reversal communications. We find that compared with that of OFDM system, the computational complexity of a time-reversal system at the transmitter side is lower since it requires similar additions but no multiplications. Furthermore, the computational complexity of a time-reversal system at the receiver side is negligible since only onetap detection is performed, which means that the overall computational complexity of time-reversal system is much lower than that of OFDM system. Moreover, we find that when the bandwidth is large enough, time-reversal system can achieve much higher achievable rate than OFDM system. Therefore, time-reversal technique is a desired solution to low complexity high throughput wideband communications when more bandwidth is available.