Time-of-Arrival Estimation Based on Information Theoretic Criteria

The possibility to accurately localize tags by using wireless techniques is of great importance for several emerging applications in the Internet of Things. Precise ranging can be obtained with ultra wideband (UWB) impulse radio (IR) systems, where short impulses are transmitted, and their time-of-arrival (ToA) is estimated at the receiver. Due to the presence of noise and multipath, the estimator has the difficult task of discriminating the time intervals where the received waveform is due to noise only, by those where there are also signal components. Common low-complexity methods use an energy detector (ED), whose output is compared with a threshold, to discriminate the time intervals containing noise only from those containing signal plus noise. Optimal threshold design for these methods requires knowledge of the channel impulse response and of the receiver noise power. We propose a different approach, where ToA estimation is based on model selection by information theoretic criteria (ITC). The resulting ToA algorithms do not use thresholds, and do not require any information about the channel or the noise power level. These blind, universal ToA estimators show, for completely unknown multipath channels and in the presence of noise with unknown power, excellent performance when compared with ideal genie-aided schemes.