Joint Timing and Channel Estimation for Ultra-Wideband Signals

Abstract

This paper is concerned with timing synchronization of high rates UWB signals operating in a dense multipath environment, where access must tackle inter-frame interference (IFI), inter-symbol interference (ISI) and even multi-user interference (MUI). A training-based joint timing and channel estimation scheme is proposed, which is resilient to IFI, ISI, MUI and pulse distortion. A low-complexity detection scheme similar to transmit-reference (TR) scheme comes out as a by-product. For saving the training symbols, we further develop an extended decision-directed (DD) scheme. A lower bound on the probability of correct detection is derived which agrees well with the simulated result for moderate to high SNR values. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a significant performance gain in terms of mean square error and bit error rate in comparison to the “timing with dirty templates” (TDT) algorithms.