Evaluation of TOA estimation algorithms in UWB receivers

UWB technology is especially suitable for location and tracking applications due to its high bandwidth, which allows a great accuracy on Time Of Arrival (TOA) estimation. Nevertheless, the achievement of this goal on multipath environments requires the design of efficient detection algorithms. The main objective of this paper is to compare and to provide a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of different TOA-based distance estimation mechanisms joint to receiver architectures proposed for UWB systems. This comparison has been done in terms of accuracy and the effect of characteristic parameters of the transmitted signal, propagation conditions and signal-to-noise ratio has been analyzed. With this purpose a simulation tool has been developed and the different receiver architectures and estimation mechanisms have been implemented, as well as the different channel models proposed on 802.15.4a.