A new approach to time-of-arrival estimation based on information theoretic criteria

Existing energy detector (ED)-based methods for time-of-arrival (ToA) estimation in ultrawide band (UWB) impulse radios (IRs) use a threshold to discriminate the time bins containing noise from those containing signal plus noise. For these threshold crossing (TC) methods the key problem is the design of the threshold level to obtain the best possible ranging accuracy. Threshold design for TC methods is a difficult problem, and requires receiver noise power knowledge. We here propose a completely different approach, where there is no threshold and where the noise power knowledge is not required. Our blind and robust ToA estimation technique is based on information theoretic criteria (ITC). The proposed ToA algorithm is universal, in that it does not require any information about the channel or the noise power level, and it eliminates the need to set a predefined threshold. The performance of the proposed universal ToA estimator is evaluated in realistic multipath channels, revealing excellent performance and robustness.