Symbol timing offset, which is mainly caused by erroneous initial-frame synchronization and the power delay profile of the channel, is one of the most typical channel impairments in a wireless communication receiver. Timing offset may give rise to inter-symbol interference, inter-carrier interference and distortion of the desired symbol, which greatly affects the system performance....[ Read more ]

Symbol timing offset, which is mainly caused by erroneous initial-frame synchronization and the power delay profile of the channel, is one of the most typical channel impairments in a wireless communication receiver. Timing offset may give rise to inter-symbol interference, inter-carrier interference and distortion of the desired symbol, which greatly affects the system performance.

In this dissertation, we investigate the timing offset estimation for multi-band OFDM Ultra-Wideband (MB-OFDM UWB) systems. Of particular interests to our investigation is the low-complexity alternative to the optimal but high-complexity Maximum-Likelihood solution. By utilizing the periodic property of the preamble synchronization sequence in MB-OFDM UWB, we derive a multiplication-based cross-correlation function that not only involves less computational and hardware overhead, but also suppress multipath components and noise at a greater extent. Further, we propose a novel three-stage timing synchronization algorithm, which outperforms the prior related works in terms of perfect synchronization probability and mean squared error especially at low-to-moderate signal-to-noise ratios.