Data-Aided Timing Acquisition in UWB Differential Transmitted Reference Systems

Timing acquisition constitutes a major challenge in realizing highly efficient ultra-wideband (UWB) systems for applications such as indoor wireless communications. To bypass channel estimation the transmitted reference (TR) signaling is a promising candidate. In this paper, we suggest a novel data-aided timing acquisition technique for frame-level synchronization in differential transmitted reference (DTR) UWB systems. Being based on parallel integrate-and-dump (I&D) operations within different pulse-pair correlator branches, the proposed timing acquisition technique performs particularly well at higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The good performance of it is confirmed by simulation results