Timing Acquisition of Ultra-wideband Signals in the Presence of Clock Frequency Offset

This paper is concerned with timing acquisition for ultra-wideband (UWB) communication systems operating in a dense multipath environment with a modest clock frequency offset (CFO). A low complexity maximum likelihood acquisition scheme based on a practical energy detector is considered in this paper where the dwell time for observing the signal at a given trial offset is fixed. This dwell time interval is subdivided into a number of coherent integration subintervals (CIS) with the outcomes of the subintervals accumulated on a noncoherent basis. The detection performance is analyzed as a function of the number of subintervals which provides a means of optimizing the synchronization algorithm given parameters of the typical CFO and input SNR that will be encountered. Simulation results are provided based on the IEEE 802.15.3a CM3 channel model