Due to not requiring channel state information （CSI） at both the transmitter and the receiver, noncoherent ultra-wideband （UWB） incurs a performance penalty of approximately 3 dB in the required signal to noise ratio （SNR） compared to the coherent case. To overcome the gap, an effective differential encoding and decoding scheme for multiband UWB systems is proposed. The proposed scheme employs the parallel concatenation of two recursive differential unitary space-frequency encoders at the transmitter. At the receiver, two component decoders iteratively decode information bits by interchanging soft metric values between each other. To reduce the computation complexity, a decoding algorithm which only uses transition probability to calculate the log likelihood ratios （LLRs） for the decoded bits is given. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can dramatically outperform the conventional differential and even coherent detection at high SNR with a few iterations.
