Improving Localization of Mobile Agents: the Approach of Averaged Dirty Templates in IR-UWB Ranging

Wireless sensor networking (WSNing) is drawing the attention of both scientific and industrial communities as it represents a low cost and effective approach to develop intelligent environments. As a result, a remarkable effort is nowadays spent to standardize a reference communication platform, as far as the PHY and MAC layers are concerned. Recently, indicated as IEEE 802.15.4a standard, IR-UWB technology is an efficient candidate for PHY layer, due to its high transmission rate and the additional benefit of localization capability. This paper deals with a localization scheme that makes use of an innovative time of arrival protocol based on dirty templates correlation, with the aim of improving their performance in noisy channels. Achieved results point out the suitability of the proposed approach for several realistic scenarios, despite the fact that the ranging accuracy is reduced by the influence of long term fading effects.