Time-of-Arrival Estimation with FLOM-MUSIC Under Impulsive Noise

FLOM-MUSIC (fractional lower order moment- MUSIC), a high resolution spectral estimation algorithm, is proposed for TOA (time of arrival) estimation under non-Gaussian noise. While Gaussianity is the conventional model in statistical signal processing, it does not accurately represent noise with impulsive nature that do occur in some wireless environments. FLOM-MUSIC is, in particular, designed for the a-stable model of impulsive noise and the peaks of its pseudo-spectra are used to estimate impulse response of the channel, i.e. the TOA of the impulse over each path in the channel. It is assumed that the first arriving path of the multi-path indoor channel is LOS (line-of-sight) and the delay of the first arrival is taken as the TOA estimate. Simulation results indicate that FLOM-MUSIC accurately estimates multi-path delays of indoor radio channel and outperforms the conventional second-order statistics based MUSIC under impulsive noise, modelled as a-stable