NDA maximum-likelihood timing acquisition of UWB signals

In this paper, the problem of blind timing acquisition of UWB signals is addressed from the maximum likelihood perspective. The paper concentrates on the derivation of a frame-level timing estimator irrespective of the transmitted symbols and the received waveform. The proposed method is able to succeed in the absence of channel estimation in spite of the severe channel distortion involved in the propagation of UWB signals. In addition, and for the low-SNR regime, it is shown that the proposed method outperforms existing acquisition techniques for UWB signals.