Two-stage acquisition in time-hopping impulse radio systems for UWB communications

Ultra wideband impulse radio is a promising radio technology for networks delivering extremely high data rates at short ranges. The use of extremely short duration pulses however makes synchronization task more difficult. In this paper a two-stage acquisition with serial search noncoherent correlator for time hopping impulse radio is proposed. The proposed two-stage acquisition scheme gets chip timing synchronization, and aligns phase of the local time-hopping code in two stages successively. With the aid of flow-graph approach, the analytical expressions are presented for the mean acquisition time and the probability of acquisition. Numerical results in a slow fading channel show that the proposed two-stage acquisition method can offer much shorter mean acquisition time or much higher probability of acquisition than that of the conventional acquisition.