  Due to a large number of multipath components in a typical ultra wideband
(UWB) system, selective Rake (SRake) receivers, which combine energy from a
subset of multipath components, are commonly employed. In order to optimize
system performance, an optimal selection of multipath components to be employed
at fingers of an SRake receiver needs to be considered. In this paper, this
finger selection problem is investigated for a minimum mean square error (MMSE)
UWB SRake receiver. Since the optimal solution is NP hard, a genetic algorithm
(GA) based iterative scheme is proposed, which can achieve near-optimal
performance after a reasonable number of iterations. Simulation results are
presented to compare the performance of the proposed finger selection algorithm
with those of the conventional and optimal schemes.
