Robust time-of-arrival estimation with an energy detection receiver

In this paper we derive and analyze a novel time-of-arrival estimation rule, which is robust to channel length uncertainty and requires a-priori knowledge of noise variance and signal-to-noise ratio only. This estimator can easily be implemented using the output of a standard energy detection receiver. Moreover, we show by means of computer simulations applying various channel models that the proposed rule outperforms state of the art low complexity time-of-arrival estimation rules in terms of root mean squared error.