Experimental characterization of ranging in IEEE802.15.4a using a coherent reference receiver

Real time locating systems (RTLS) and wireless sensor networks are currently a hot and challenging research topic. Ultra wideband (UWB) shows promising properties for these systems, such as low-power transmitter designs and highly accurate ranging, where cm-level accuracy is achievable even in multipath intensive environments. A high-performance reference receiver architecture based on coherent processing is presented in this paper. It is used to define quality metrics of the received signals, as for example peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and line-of-sight signal to noise ratio (LSNR) for ranging, and Eb/N0 for communication. These metrics are used to evaluate the experimental data in their quality and their ranging performance. Furthermore, performance trade-offs w.r.t. system parameter and receiver architecture choices, in particular for non-coherent receivers, can be analyzed. In this work, the reference receiver is verified experimentally using IEEE 802.15.4a compliant signals. The ranging performance is correlated to the signal-to-noise ratios for an indoor line-of-sight measurement campaign.