Low-complexity two-stage timing acquisition scheme for UWB communications

A novel data-aided timing acquisition scheme is proposed for UWB wireless communications. We adopt a two-stage strategy similar to the representative least-squares (LS) timing scheme. At the first stage, pulse-level timing recovery is achieved by exploiting a frame-long template which is generated from received waveform. At the second stage, frame-level offset is obtained using offset parameters estimated in the previous stage. It entails a small amount of training symbols and allows low-complexity demodulation which bypasses costly channel estimation. Unlike conventional LS-based scheme, the proposed scheme introduces a more efficient maximum-likelihood (ML) method at the second stage, replacing complex LS method. Through performance simulations and implementation evaluations, it is shown that the proposed timing scheme largely reduces computational complexity, while exhibiting a nearly equivalent performance compared with conventional LS-based scheme.