An Energy-Proportion Synchronization Method for IR-UWB Communications

In this paper, a novel synchronization method for IR-UWB systems is proposed. Integrate-and-dump operations at the symbol rate are done over the product of the received signal and its Ts-delayed replica. The relative proportion of the two parts constituting these symbol-rate samples, termed the "energy-proportion" in this paper, makes it possible to achieve frame-level synchronization in a fast and reliable way. Two propositions were developed to estimate the energy-proportion in both nondata-aided (NDA) and data-aided (DA) modes, and a training pattern was designed for the DA mode. Simulations indicate that the DA proposition outperforms NDA in terms of both mean square error and bit-error rate. This new synchronization method eliminates the slide-correlating operation required in most existing alternatives, and thus considerably shortens the synchronization time and reduces the complexity.