Joint estimation and detection of UWB signals with timing offset error and unknown channel

Abstract

An ultra-wideband (UWB) receiver that jointly estimates and detects the received signal when the channel is unknown and the transmitter and receiver clocks are not synchronized is presented. Instead of using a RAKE receiver, which requires knowledge of the received monocycle, the entire receiver pulse is estimated directly. By formulating the time-varying pulse samples in each frame as the interpolated versions of a fixed template pulse, an extended Kalman filter (EKF) can be used to estimate the channel and the timing off-set. Because the EKF is computationally demanding, a simplified EKF with negligible loss in performance is also proposed. The EKF operates jointly with a per-survivor processing (PSP) unit to detect the received signal.