Rapid acquisition of ultra-wideband radio signals

Impulse radio provides many promising features for wireless communications in a dense multipath environment. However, a number of these features result from the enormous effective processing gain, which can make acquisition difficult at the receiver. A recently developed theory of minimum complexity sequential detection is applied to the hybrid acquisition problem. As in previous hybrid schemes, a number of hypotheses are checked as a group; however, a hypothesis is disregarded as soon as it looks unlikely rather than waiting for a "winner" to be chosen from the group. Another hypothesis then replaces the disregarded hypothesis. This novel scheme is shown to improve average acquisition times for highly spread systems.