Multi-Dimensional Detector for UWB Ranging Systems in Dense Multipath Environments

The use of ultra wideband (UWB) technology for high-resolution ranging is widely addressed in the literature, and most these studies assume the use of a correlation detector to determine the arrival time of the first path component. The correlation detector well performs in environments without signal distortion. However, dense multi-path propagation and frequency selective fading, as encountered in a typical UWB environment, force the received UWB signal to behave like a random waveform. Such a waveform is multi-dimensional in the sense that any single preset template can only capture partial signal energy for ranging. In coping with this situation, we show in this paper how to use multi-dimensional detectors for enhancing the ranging performance. The superiority of the new detectors to the conventional one is theoretically analyzed and confirmed through simulations based on real UWB data.