Abstract— This paper shows the application of a recently proposed statistical characterization of the ultra-wideband (UWB) radio channel to the standardized IEEE 802.15.4a UWB physical layer (PHY). The statistical channel characterization yields the first and second-order moments of the autocorrelation function of the received UWB pulses, which can accurately express the intraburst interference due to multipath propagation. The presented mathematical framework directly shows the influence of channel and system parameters, like bandwidth and delay spread, on the performance of a coherent receiver. The results show for a non-line-of-sight indoor channel, e.g. a reduction of the fading