Design Considerations for an UWB Computationally-Efficient Fast Acquisition System for Indoor Line-of-Sight Ranging Applications

This paper presents an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) computationally-efficient fast acquisition system suggested for ranging in indoor, Line-Of-Sight (LOS) environments. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated and its implementation issues are discussed. The design complexity leverages field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to implement the parallel processing concept. Timing acquisition at high sampling rates of the ultra-short pulses used in UWB communications can be costly and slow for ranging. This is due to the large number of required operations in an intensive software-based signal processing. The proposed UWB scheme in this paper uses an efficient block-processing technique that simplifies hardware implementation with a greatly reduced number of operations and acquisition time, while also offering accurate ranging capabilities over the considered indoor channel at high levels of multiple-user interference (MUI) and Gaussian noise.