Low Complexity Acquisition of UWB Telemetry Data Packets with Clock Offset

In this paper, low complexity acquisition of UWB telemetry data packets is addressed. In addition to the usual channel impairments considered of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) noise and multipath, the sensor clock is assumed to be unsynchronized relative to the access node such that there is a random clock offset. The proposed method involves a multi-hypothesis outer search over the arrival time of the packet. For each arrival time hypothesis, a simple and low complexity two-stage practical acquisition algorithm based on dirty template (DT) which is called multi-stage DT (MSDT) is utilized to estimate and extract a template suitable for the data decoding. For this algorithm symbol level (SL) acquisition is achieved first based on symbol-long DT (SLDT). Next, the frame level (FL) acquisition is obtained using frame-long DT (FLDT), which further enhances the acquisition accuracy by employing processing gain within each UWB symbol waveform. Performance of this proposed algorithm is compared to an acquisition algorithm based on single-stage exhaustive search (ES).