New preamble design for reduced-complexity timing acquisition in UWB systems

Abstract

UWB(ultra-wideband) is a promising technology for short-range wireless communications, like in WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Networks) applications. In the context of UWB impulse radio, one of the crucial challenges remains the acquisition of synchronization in terms of time, precision and number of operations. Particularly the serial search is the simplest in the correlator based acquisition scheme. This scheme can accomplish accurate acquisition. On the other hand, shortening the acquisition time is required. In this thesis, we present a novel strategy for reducing the integration duration and the sampling rate required for the coarse acquisition of preamble sequences (at the chip level), thus speeding up the overall synchronization process. We will also introduce the doubly spread sequence as the preamble which we found effective in shortening the integration duration of the sliding correlator and still maintaining good autocorrelation property. With simulation studies, we found that the new scheme shows less performance deterioration than other reduced complexity timing acquisition schemes using pseudo-noise (PN) sequences as the preamble.