Timing acquisition performance metrics of Tc–DTR UWB receivers over frequency–Selective fading channels with narrow–Band interference

The successful deployment of Impulse Radio (IR) Ultra Wide Band (UWB) wireless communication systems requires that they coexist and contend with a variety of interfering signals co–located over the same transmission band. In fact, if on the one hand the large transmission bandwidth of IR– UWB signals allows them to resolve multipath components and exploit multipath diversity, on the other hand it yields some new coexistence challenges for both unlicensed commercial and military communication systems, which are required to be robust to unintentional and intentional jammers, respectively. In particular, the design and analysis of low–complexity receiver schemes with good synchronization capabilities and high robustness to Narrow– Band Interference (NBI) is acknowledged as an important issue in IR–UWB research. Motivated by this consideration, in [1] we have recently proposed a low–complexity receiver design, the so– called Chip–Time Differential Transmitted–Reference (Tc–DTR) scheme, and have shown that it is more robust to NBI than other non–coherent receiver schemes available in the literature. In this paper, we aim at generalizing the results in [1] and at developing the enabling analytical tools for the analysis and design of timing acquisition algorithms for non–coherent receivers over frequency–selective fading channels with NBI. Furthermore, we move from the proposed analytical framework to tackle the optimization problem of devising optimal signature codes to reduce the impact of NBI on the performance of the Tc–DTR synchronizer. Analytical frameworks and findings are substantiated via Monte Carlo simulations.