Ultra-Wideband Signal Acquisition in Non-Gaussian Noise via Successive Sampling

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communications is envisaged to be deployed in indoor environments, where the noise distribution is decidedly non-Gaussian. A critical challenge for UWB is the synchronization of nanosecond-long pulses. In this paper, we propose a signal acquisition scheme that is robust to uncertainties in the noise distribution. Following Huber´s M-estimates for the Gaussian mixture noise model, the successive sampling-based robust acquisition system outperforms Gaussian-optimal maximum likelihood approach. We present performance evaluation based on the normalized mean-square error and the bit-error rate.