UWB Search Strategies for Minimal-Length Preamble and a Low-Complexity Analog Receiver

Impulse-based ultra-wideband systems are appealing for low-power short-range communications as they can benefit from low-complexity analog architectures. Having such a receiver in mind, we consider two pulse position and code phase acquisition search strategies, as synchronization remains the biggest bottleneck of UWB. Moreover, as the transmitter power consumption increases proportionally with synchronization preamble length, we minimize it for both strategies. A single-step solution recovering both pulse position and code phase achieves a performance within 1.5 dB from an ideally synchronized system, for a preamble length limited to 200 bits. This perfectly suits duty-cycled systems transmitting short data bursts at minimal power consumption, while a two-step solution suffers too much from non-coherent pulse recombination