A novel timing acquisition scheme based on energy detection for UWB communications

A novel data-aided timing acquisition scheme based on energy detection is proposed for UWB wireless communications. According to previous least squares (LS) scheme, the pulse-level timing recovery is achieved first by exploiting a frame-long template, which is generated from received waveform. Subsequently, the frame-level offset is obtained adopting the least squares method. Compared with LS scheme, the proposed scheme introduces an energy detection process, which amounts to search the maximum energy value of a partial signal region. Such improvement efficiently suppresses the noise component during energy collection, and thus enhances estimation performance. Simulation results on mean square error (MSE) performance are given afterwards, along with evaluations on searching strategies with regard to timing accuracy and computational complexity for practical design.