An Experimental UWB Distance Measurement System

This paper presents a distance-measuring system based on the accurate round-trip time-of-flight measurement of single ultra-wideband pulses, propagating between two transceiver devices. The architectures of two realized devices, referred to as master and slave, are described. The master device implements the time-interval measuring function, by means of a time-to-digital converter integrated circuit, while the slave acts as pulse repeater. Both devices are designed for low-cost realization and low-power operations. This paper also presents and discusses some experimental results obtained from the system prototype. Finally, some numerical simulations results are shown, which could provide an explanation for the non-idealities in the observed distance-measuring behaviour of the system.