Low Complexity Burst Packet Detection for Wireless-Powered UWB RFID Systems

This paper addresses the issue of UWB signal acquisition in the context of wireless powered UWB RFID systems. In this scenario, the data transmission is based on short packet so as to meet the micro-power budget of autonomous power harvesting. The burst short packet transmission as well as the low duty cycling UWB pulse modulation places a stringent challenge at the UWB receiver for timing acquisition and packet detection. Besides, in a positioning enabled RFID system where variable signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) due to the variable link distance and noise background is unavoidable, conventional packet detection schemes rely on predefined threshold can hardly achieve good performance. In this study, we propose a low complexity method for burst packet detection. It is performed by sensing the preamble signal characteristic instead of the received signal strength, and thus bypassing the necessity of detection threshold. The validity of the proposed approach and its adaptivity to SNR variations is demonstrated by simulation results as well as field test with a UWB software defined radio (SDR) platform.