Frame-frequency estimation in ultrawideband systems

This paper investigates the estimation of the frame frequency in ultrawideband (UWB) communication systems. An estimation method is proposed that exploits the transmission of a periodic pulse sequence at the frame frequency. The samples of the received waveform are used to compute a cost function that depends on a trial value of the incoming pulse frequency. The location of the maximum provides an estimate of the transmitted frequency. The performance of the estimator is assessed theoretically and is compared to the Cramer-Rao lower bound. It is shown that in certain conditions the estimator achieves the bound at high SNR values. Simulations validate the theory and show the degradations in the estimation performance caused by multiple-access interference. They also give an idea of the estimation accuracy needed in a correlation receiver.