Rank reduction for rapid timing acquisition in multiple access communications

This work presents our new results on data-driven rank reduction for rapid timing acquisition in multiple access (MA) communications systems. The results generally apply to multiple access systems, such as code-division multiple access (CDMA) and the ultra-wide band (UWB) systems, operating over environments with severe radio interference. Our results show that when only a limited amount of data is available, rather than the true statistics required for timing acquisition, reduced rank solutions provide more reliable timing information than high-rank solutions. Our results demonstrate that a low-rank version of the objective function for timing acquisition, using the estimated statistic is less sensitive to spurious peaks than that of the high-rank solutions.