Rapid Acquisition of Ultra-Wideband Signals in Multipath Environments

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is a promising technology which enables high-rate, low-cost communications at short ranges. One of the most important challenges in the design of UWB systems is timing acquisition in terms of speed, accuracy, and complexity. Fine time resolution of UWB signal introduces a large search space. Also, due to the very low power of the received signal, it needs to be observed for a long time to make a reliable decision. These two problems make the process of acquisition unacceptably slow. In this paper, the authors introduce a new two-stage technique to reduce the search space and consequently the acquisition time. The performance of the proposed acquisition technique is investigated in terms of mean acquisition time and probability of correct acquisition and compared with the traditional serial search. The results show a great improvement in the speed of the acquisition without additional complexity