Abstract This Thesis examines low complexity receiver structures for impulse-radio (IR) ultra-wideband (UWB) systems to be used in wireless sensor network applications. Such applications require radio communication solutions characterized by low cost, low complexity hardware and low power consumption to provide very long battery life. Analysis of several auto-correlation receiver (AcR) structures is performed in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise to identify receiver structures that offer a good compromise between implementation complexity and data communication performance. The classes of receiver that demonstrate the best complexity/performance trade-off are shown to be the AcR utilising transmitted-reference with binary pulse amplitude modulation signaling, and the energy detector (ED) utilising binary pulse position modulation. The analysis of these two schemes is extended to consider multipath fading channels. Numerically integrable bit error rate probability (BEP) expressions are derived in order to evaluate the receivers' performance in the presence of fading distributions characterized by closed form characteristic functions. Simulations utilising widely accepted UWB channel models are then used to evaluate the BEP in different indoor environments. Since UWB systems share frequency spectrum with many narrowband (NB) systems, and need to coexist with other UWB systems, the performance of low complexity receivers can be seriously affected by interference. In the presence of NB interference, two cases have been considered: 1) single NB interference, where the interfering node is located at a fixed distance from the receiver, and 2) multiple NB interference, where the interfering nodes are scattered according to a spatial Poisson process. When considering UWB interference, the case of multiple sources of interference has been considered. For both the multiple NB and the multiple UWB interference cases, the model derived considers several interference parameters, which can be integrated into BEP formulations for quick performance evaluations. The framework is sufficiently simple to allow tractable analysis and can serve as a guideline for the design of heterogeneous networks where coexistence between UWB systems and NB systems is of importance. The very large bandwidth of UWB signals offers an unprecedented possibility for accurate ranging operations. Signal leading-edge estimation algorithms based on average maximum likelihood estimators are derived considering different multipath channel fading distributions. Suboptimal solutions are proposed and investigated in order to support ranging capabilities in low complexity receiver structures. The ability to identify line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions with the ED-based receiver is also addressed. An example of an IR-UWB low complexity transceiver based on ED for sensor network applications is proposed in this Thesis. Ad-hoc solutions for pulse transmission, synchronization and data detection are developed.