On the Blind Estimation of Chip Time of Time-Hopping Signals Through Minimization of a Multimodal Cost Function

Abstract : In this correspondence, we focus on blind estimation of the chip duration of time-hopping signals by introducing a cost function based on time-of-arrival (ToA) folding over multiple observation sets. An opti- mization algorithm that takes advantage of the highly oscillatory behavior in the nearby of the global minimum is proposed and a performance bound for the chip time estimate is derived. The pertinence of our approach is shown through numerical results, considering alternative methods like pe- riodogram and separable least squares line search. The proposed technique enables a good tradeoff between statistical accuracy and computational complexity.