ToA estimation for MB-OFDM UWB by suppressing energy leakage

In this paper, we estimate the time-of-arrival (ToA) of wireless channels by using the widely adopted equally-spaced channel estimator for the multi-band orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultrawide-band (UWB) system. By suppressing the energy leakage due to the imperfect sampling of the leading channel paths, a novel ToA estimator is proposed for the MB-OFDM UWB system. This ToA estimator is evaluated and compared with the space alternating generalized expectation maximization (SAGE) algorithm in IEEE 802.15.4a UWB channels. Simulation results show that the proposed ToA estimator performs well in all channel models and outperforms SAGE by directly locating the first channel path.