Experimental validation of a TOA UWB ranging platform with the energy detection receiver

Despite a vast body of research on ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging and localization, relatively little knowledge is available regarding practical implementations of the proposed ideas. Although there are some testbeds already proposed and built, most of them imply a sort of correlation and require very high sampling rates (in the order of several GS/s) which are still difficult to realize in hardware. Moreover, the majority of the platforms does not support visualization of results in real-time. Details on the hardware implementation of the commercially available products, e.g. Ubisense or Time Domain, are not publicly accessible. In this paper, results on the experimental validation of the UWB-based ranging platform with real-time signal processing are presented. The platform is based on the time-of-arrival (ToA) technique and relatively simple to implement non-coherent energy detection receiver architecture. Such a receiver does not require high sampling rates nor information about the channel. Our measurement results indicate that it is possible to achieve ranging accuracy of 1-2 cm with the sampling rate of 500 MS/s and with max. 3 bits of the A/D resolution.