A Fast UWB Timing Acquisition Scheme with Robustness to Multiple Access Interference

The major challenges confronted in the timing acquisition for ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems are enormous search space, extremely low signal power and the heavy multiple access interference (MAI) environments. Since the acquisition methods with the conventional preamble structure suffer severe performance degradation in the presence of interference, the authors present a novel preamble structure in this paper where the preambles for different users have unequal symbol durations. The proposed structure associated with any acquisition algorithm can improve the accuracy of timing estimation and shorten the acquisition time significantly for multi-user systems, which is demonstrated by both theoretical analyses and simulation results.