Performance Evaluation of a Computationally-Efficient Acquisition Scheme for DS-UWB Signals

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) has been recently promoted as a very promising technology for wireless communications. Rapid and accurate timing acquisition of ultra-short pulses and the high sampling rates required create challenges for both signal acquisition and the overall UWB transceiver implementation, and even more so under non-ideal conditions. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of a computationally-efficient implementation of a DS-UWB acquisition scheme. The suggested rapid acquisition system based on a block-processing technique adapted to a circular frequency domain correlation, shows explicit design characteristics that offer greatly improved acquisition time, accuracy and implementation cost, while also yielding very satisfactory performances at high noise and MAI levels.