A Novel TOA Estimation Using Multiple Masks Operation for Non-coherent IR-UWB Systems

This paper proposes a non-coherent time of arrival (TOA) estimation scheme using multiple Gold sequences on the existence of simultaneously operating piconets (SOPs). The proposed non-coherent receiver is composed of a series of energy collectors and low-bit analog to digital converters (ADCs). To mitigate the degradation of TOA estimation due to mutual interferences induced by multiple SOPs, the employment of Gold sequence is considered in this paper. Towards this, multiple masks operation (MMO) constructed by sub-Gold sequences are processed to enhance the quality of correlation property. Precisely, accumulation and overlapped multiplication processes make possible to improve the resolution so that the accurate TOA information can be achieved via proper comparison with a certain prescribed threshold. Furthermore, the search back window (SBW) method will be proposed to produce enhanced TOA estimation capability. The performance of the proposed SBW accompanied by sub-Gold sequence masks is verified by conducting proper simulations under two types of channel conditions. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme performs well even in a condensed indoor multipath environment on the existence of multiple SOPs.