Code-Assisted Blind Synchronization for UWB Systems

Synchronization is a critical issue in ultra-wideband (UWB) communications. In conventional UWB systems employing time-hopping, the time-shifted pulses in each symbol interval have the same polarity. Here, to ease synchronization, we modify the polarity of the pulses using carefully designed binary codes. The proposed algorithm is based on the correlation of the received waveform and the code template. The proposed code-assisted blind synchronization (CABS) requires symbol sampling rate only, and it is shown via simulations to significantly outperform existing blind synchronization methods in terms of both mean-square errors and bit error rate, at the expense of a moderate increase in computational complexity.