Blind Low Complexity Time-Of-Arrival Estimation Algorithm for UWB Signals

This letter presents a novel time-of-arrival (TOA) blind estimation technique for ultra wideband energy detection receivers with reduced complexity. The proposed method is blind in the sense that it does not exploit any information about channel or noise power. This new approach is based on a set of approximations of the exact likelihood function (ELF) of the observed energy. Even though these approximations achieve an important reduction of complexity, the shape of the new approximated function is accurate enough compared to the ELF. Application of a threshold to the differential of the approximated log-likelihood function completes the procedure. Simulations show that the performance of the proposed method in terms of the cumulative distribution function of the estimation error approaches that of a method based on the ELF and a genie-aided algorithm with perfect knowledge of the optimal threshold.