Linear quadrature optimisation-based non-coherent time of arrival estimation scheme for impulse radio ultra-wideband systems

Owing to the extremely high-time resolution of impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB), time of arrival (TOA) estimation has been an important and tempting issue of this technology ever since its emergence. Conventional TOA estimation (TOAE) schemes require prohibitively high sampling rate and a priori knowledge of the received signal, and hence render a practical implementation rigorous or even infeasible. To tackle these drawbacks, this paper proposes a low-complexity energy detection-based non-coherent TOAE scheme, which is composed of two processing stages: initial signal acquisition (ISA) and fine timing estimation (FTE). In the ISA stage, a linear quadrature optimisation (LQO)-based weighting scheme is proposed to coarsely capture the arrival of the IR-UWB signals. Capitalising on the acquisition of the IR-UWB signal in a relatively short time range, the authors then develop in the FTE stage, a double-threshold test (DTT) tailored for locating the leading edge of the IR-UWB signal. Simulations illustrate that the LQO algorithm yields a considerably increased probability of seizing the arrival of the IR-UWB signals in a blind manner, and the DTT strategy significantly ameliorates the TOAE accuracy in terms of mean absolute error, compared with the conventional energy detection-based TOAE methods.