Acquisition Performance Comparison of Energy Detector and Single-pulse Correlator for UWB Systems

Efficient acquisition is a very challenge task for ultra-wideband (UWB) systems due to the extremely low transmission power of UWB signals. An energy detector (ED) is not only easy to implement in practice but also can combine the multipath energy, which in turn renders a possible gain in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the acquisition algorithm. In this paper, we propose a two-step random search algorithm for the acquisition process. The acquisition performances of single-pulse correlator schemes and ED schemes are analyzed and compared over a common stage. The results show the ED scheme achieves a much faster average acquisition time (AAT) than the single-pulse correlator scheme does under the same false-acquisition rate (FAR) constraint.