Joint TOA and AOA Estimation of UWB Signal Using Time Domain Smoothing

This paper presents an ultrawide-band (UWB) channel sounding scheme with a technique for estimating time of arrival (TOA) and angle of arrival (AOA) using an antenna array time domain smoothing. The smoothing averages over the time domain UWB signals of several immediate neighbor elements of the array, which is expected to be similar to the increasing number of snapshots as well as the mitigation of the TOA estimation error. After the TOA estimation using the time domain smoothing UWB signal, one time domain sample corresponding to the strongest TOA was eliminated. Then fast Fourier transform (FFT) was performed and AOA was estimated for every frequency point. These processes were iterated after selecting the next strongest TOA until all the available TOAs were eliminated. The result of anechoic chamber tests using two sources indicated that the resolution of TOA was more than 1 ns, that of AOA was more than 3deg for half wavelength element spacing.