Raise Your Voice at a Proper Pace to Synchronize in Multiple Ad Hoc Piconets

Abstract

Timing synchronization of symbol boundaries is known to affect critically the performance of all coherent communication systems. Its effects are particularly pronounced in contemporary wireless technologies including ultrawideband (UWB) radios and wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where cooperative or ad hoc access is challenged by arbitrary asynchronism, intersymbol interference (ISI), receiver noise, as well as inter and intrapiconet interference arising from concurrently communicating nodes. To cope with these challenges, this paper introduces piconet-specific synchronization patterns and simple averaging operations at the receiving ends, which enable low-complexity timing acquisition through energy detection and demodulation by matching to a synchronized aggregate template (SAT). Pattern sequences are designed for both training-based and blind operation. Either way, the idea behind these designs is to periodically increase the transmit-power ("voice") of each piconet's synchronizing node with a period ("pace") characteristic of each piconet. Performance of the novel synchronization protocols is tested with simulations conforming to an UWB wireless personal area network (WPAN) setup