Blind UWB timing with a dirty template

Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio is gaining increasing attention thanks to its attractive features that include low-power low-complexity baseband operation and ample multipath diversity. Realization of its potential, however, faces the challenge of low-complexity high-performance timing acquisition. In this paper, we develop a blind timing acquisition algorithm for frame-level synchronization. Relying on simple integrate-and-dump operations over one symbol duration, our algorithm exploits the rich multipath diversity enabled by UWB transmissions. It outperforms existing blind algorithms and has comparable performance to data-aided ones. Equally attractive is its applicability to UWB links with or without time hopping (TH), over frequency-flat or multipath channels. It is also worth stressing that our "dirty" template based scheme is able to achieve timing synchronization at any desirable resolution and is readily applicable to non-UWB systems, so long as intersymbol interference is absent.