On phaser-based processing of impulse radio UWB over fiber systems employing SOA

•Phaser-based processing is investigated for the first time for IR-UWB over fiber systems.•The influence of up-down chirping slopes is analyzed with a SOA as an inline amplifier.•The scheme requires no sampling of the UWB signal and thus enables low complexity implementation.•The proposed approach offers a better robustness against both ASE noise and nonlinearities.•The performance improvement in terms of both bit-error-rate and power efficiency is evaluated.