Timing acquisition dispensing with searching for UWB communications

One of the biggest challenges in ultra-wideband (UWB) communications is the accurate and rapid timing acquisition for the receiver. This paper presents a timing acquisition scheme dispensing with searching for UWB communications. Without training sequence involved, timing offset parameter is estimated by exploiting a stream of alternating orthogonal pulses, and frame-level synchronization can be achieved without channel information at a low sampling rate of once per symbol. Without any searching procedure, the proposed algorithm not only considerably reduces synchronization time, but also improves synchronization performance relative to the existing alternatives in terms of normalized mean square error (NMSE) and bit error rate (BER), which is confirmed by simulations.