GML ToA Estimation Based on Low Complexity UWB Energy Detection

Energy detection receiver is one of the most interesting solution for non-coherent low data rate and low complexity UWB systems. In order to keep the complexity of the receiver structure low the same approach should be used also for ToA (time of arrival) estimation purposes. In this paper, after showing that a generalized maximum likelihood estimator for ToA is a sliding window energy based estimator, an improved version of it that uses partial channel state information is proposed in order to improve the accuracy of the estimation overcoming the hardware limitation related to the minimum integration time of the integration circuit and to the available number of integrators