The transmitted reference (TR) schemes do not require the complex task of channel estimation and provide a simple receiver structure. However, the low-complexity detection in conventional TR scheme is achieved at the expense of 50% energy/rate loss. In this paper, an energy-efficient TR signaling and detection scheme is presented with the aim to improve the performance of conventional TR impulse radio UWB system. The proposed scheme is a combination of the conventional TR scheme and the differential TR scheme. The simulation results validate that the proposed TR scheme utilizes 1.76 dB less energy per bit and recovers 25% rate loss of conventional TR scheme, while maintaining the same BER performance. Further, the proposed ATR scheme improves the BER performance by about 2 dB using simple averaging of the reference pulses. ©2008 IEEE.