Symbol timing synchronization for ultra-wideband (UWB) multi-band OFDM (MB-OFDM) systems

A low-complexity correlation based symbol timing synchronization (CBTS) algorithm for UWB MB-OFDM systems is presented. The correlation based scheme attempts to locate the start of the FFT window during frame synchronization sequence (FS) of the received preamble by firstly correlating the received samples with known training samples and then identifying the first significant multi-path component by comparing the correlated samples of two consecutive OFDM symbols against a predefined threshold. Performance of the proposed algorithm is measured through mean-squared error (MSE) of timing estimation and probability of synchronization. Each of the 100 channel realizations for UWB channel model1 (CM1) (0-4 m LOS) and CM2 (0-4 m NLOS) are simulated for 1000 noisy channel realizations for 17 dB SNR. Synchronization probability and MSE for CM1 and CM2 are reported for 320 Mbps data rate.