Low Complexity Tri-Level Sampling Receiver Design for UWB Time-of-Arrival Estimation

In this paper, the effect of finite-level quantization on UWB time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation is investigated. The scheme of optimized quantization threshold combined with the post-quantization processing is derived, which is shown to provide satisfactory gains in the system performance. The TOA estimation errors of several low-resolution sampling approaches are compared via Monte Carlo simulation, where the tri-level quantizer is of particular interest due to its simplicity and capability. We demonstrate that the tri-level sampling receiver, with use of the proposed scheme provides an outstanding performance in TOA estimation with an affordable cost and low complexity.