On a Hybrid Preamble/Soft-Output Demapper Approach for Time Synchronization for IEEE 802.15.6 Narrowband WBAN

In this paper,we present a maximum likelihood(ML) based time synchronization algorithm for Wireless Body Area Networks(WBAN).The proposed technique takes advantage of soft information retrieved from the soft demapper for the time delay estimation.This algorithm has a low complexity and is adapted to the frame structure specified by the IEEE 802.15.6standard[1]for the narrowband systems.Simulation results have shown good performance which approach the theoretical mean square error limit bound represented by the Cramer Rao Bound(CRB).