Optimal Channel and Time-Of-Arrival Estimation for IR-UWB in the Presence of Pulse Overlap

We show that the common approach to channel and Time-of-Arrival (ToA) estimation for Impulse-Radio Ultra WideBand (IR-UWB), where the occurrence of pulse overlap is ignored, is bound to lead to considerable estimation errors in the presence of pulse overlap. We propose the use of a low-complexity extension of the sliding correlator as a Maximum Likelihood (ML) channel estimation method that can deal with sporadic pulse overlap due to multipath components with delay difference of less than the pulse duration. We also illustrate the superior performance of the improved estimator.