A Fast PN Code Acquisition Algorithm for DS-UWB Systems

The great potential of the direct sequence ultra- wideband (DS-UWB) depends critically on the success of timing acquisition. In this paper, we present a rapid acquisition algorithm for reducing the acquisition time of the coarse pseudo-noise (PN) sequences with the auxiliary sequence and binary search strategy based on threshold comparison criterion. Both theoretical analysis and simulation tests show that with the proposed search strategy and simple operations over the symbol duration at the receiver, our algorithm can reduce considerably the acquisition time while maintain the PN sequence acquisition probability in DS-UWB system over dense multi-path environment.