One step Impulse Radio Ultra-WideBand positioning algorithm

We consider the problem of positioning estimation with impulse radio (IR) ultra-wideband (UWB) radio under dense multipaths and additive Gaussian noise environments. Most popular positioning algorithms first estimate certain parameters (such as time of arrival (TOA), angle of arrival (AOA) and time difference of arrival (TDOA)) from the received signals. These parameters are then used to estimate the targeted position. In practice, the estimation of these parameters is not errors free and the distribution of the errors is difficult to model exactly. In contrast, we propose a novel one-step approach, which estimates the position and channels directly and jointly from the received signals of the used base stations. We use a Bayesian approach where the prior distribution of the channels follows the IEEE 802.15.4a channel model to estimate the joint posterior probability density function (pdf) of the channels, the targeted position and the transmit time. One application of the joint posterior pdf of the channels, the targeted position and the transmit time is the position determination with classical posterior estimator (such as minimum mean square error estimator (MMSE)). For computing the joint posterior pdf of the channels, the targeted position and the transmit time, we derived an algorithm which is based on sampling-importance resampling and the expectation maximization technique. Furthermore, we propose a reduced-complexity architecture of the proposed IR UWB localization system using our proposed algorithm. The algorithm can be easily implemented on hardware. Numerical evaluations under the IEEE 802.15.4a channel model are presented to demonstrate the good performance of the proposed estimator.