A practical synchronization algorithm for IEEE 802.15.4a UWB receivers

This paper proposes a two-step synchronization algorithm for UWB receivers in accordance with IEEE 802.15.4a standard. A low data rate, low complexity receiver is developed using a typical energy detection UWB non-coherent analog front-end, which consists of a square-law device and an integrate-and-dump ADC with sub-Nyquist sampling rates. A coarse synchronization algorithm, often neglected in literature, is introduced by continuously correlating received samples´ segments with a self-generated template until a simple threshold condition is satisfied. A proposed fine synchronization algorithm exploits the low sampling rates of the system and does not need to measure noise power, which helps reduce the receiver complexity (and power consumption). Finally, we assess, by simulation, the impact of different sampling rates and the synchronization lengths on bit-error-rate (BER) performance of the system.