Robust Acquisition of Ultra-Wideband Signals with Averaged Template

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 an averaged template-based signal acquisition scheme that is robust to uncertainties in the noise distribution. Following Huber´s M-estimates for the Gaussian mixture noise model, the averaged template-based robust acquisition system outperforms its traditional counterparts which are designed with Gaussian noise in mind. The authors present performance evaluation based on the asymptotic variance, normalized mean-square error, as well as the bit error rate.