A low-complexity UWB receiver concept for TOA based indoor ranging

In this paper, a new low-complexity TOA estimation strategy for UWB signals is proposed. It is shown that the TOA of the first peak of the received signal can be obtained with a simple analog receiver implementation which requires sampling rates in the order of only a few tens of MHz; at the same time, the achieved range error standard deviation is at centimeter level. A link budget evaluation under the power requirements imposed by the FCC shows that, with the suggested set of system parameters, maximum coverage of this solution is of a few hundreds of meters in LOS, making this approach ideal for low-cost, short to medium range systems which require centimeter positioning accuracy.