Improved delay-locked loop in a UWB impulse radio time-hopping spread-spectrum system

As ultra-wideband impulse radio (UWB-IR) uses short-duration impulse signals of nanoseconds, even a small number of timing errors can cause a detrimental effect on system performance. A delay-locked loop (DLL) is proposed to synchronize and reduce timing errors. The design of the DLL is vital for UWB systems. In this paper, an improved DLL is introduced to a UWB-IR time-hopping spread-spectrum system. Instead of using only two central correlator branches as in a conventional DLL, the proposed system uses two additional correlator branches with different delay parameters and different weight parameters. The performance of the proposed schemes with the optimal parameters is compared with that of traditional schemes through simulation: the proposed four-branch DLLs achieves less tracking jitter or a longer mean time to lose lock (MTLL) than the conventional two-branch DLLs if proper parameters are chosen.