Efficient search strategy for coarse synchronization of UWB signals without channel knowledge

This paper addresses the problem of coarse synchronization of ultra wideband (UWB) signals in the dense multipath channel. We propose a very simple search strategy, based on successive constant integer jumps, which practically achieves minimum mean acquisition time (MAT) without using any channel knowledge. There is a parallelism between the popular bit reversal search, which is valid when the size of the uncertainty region for the timing offset is a power of two, and the proposed search, which is valid when it is a term of the Fibonacci sequence. When this number is large, the golden section strategy, which we proposed in a previous paper, can be viewed as a generalization of this strategy. We test the proposed strategy under a model for which there exist known lower bounds for the MAT, showing that it achieves near optimal performance. Finally, we report simulations with a realistic channel model