A Synchronization Design for UWB-Based Wireless Multimedia Systems

Multi-band orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultra-wideband (UWB) technology offers large throughput, low latency and has been adopted in wireless audio/video (AV) network products. The complexity and power consumption, however, are still major hurdles for the technology to be widely adopted. In this paper, we propose a unified synchronizer design targeted for MB-OFDM transceiver that achieves high performance with low implementation complexity. The key component of the proposed synchronizer is a parallel auto-correlator structure in which multiple ACF units are instantiated and their outputs are shared by functional blocks in the synchronizer, including preamble signal detection, time-frequency code identification, symbol timing, carrier frequency offset estimation and frame synchronization. This common structure not only reduces the hardware cost but also minimizes the number of operations in the functional blocks in the synchronizer as the results of a large portion of computation can be shared among different functional blocks. To mitigate the effect of narrowband interference (NBI) on UWB systems, we also propose a low-complexity ACF-based frequency detector to facilitate the design of (adaptive) notch filter in analog/digital domain. The theoretical analysis and simulation show that the performance of the proposed design is close to optimal, while the complexity is significantly reduced compared to existing work.