UWB Ranging Based on Partial Received Sub-Band Signals in Dense Multipath Environments

In this paper, an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) receiver scheme with very low sampling rate is proposed for ranging in indoor multipath environments. The idea underlying the proposed scheme is that, instead of processing the whole UWB band, only partial sub-bands are considered at the receiver. The missing sub-bands are estimated by exploiting an estimate of the frequency correlation properties of the channel to reconstruct the signal over the whole UWB band. For the simulations, the IEEE UWB channel model is used and the range error using the proposed receiver scheme is obtained and compared to that of conventional UWB receivers which require very high sampling rates. Furthermore, a large number of UWB channel measurements in an office environment has been used to validate the accuracy of the obtained results. These results show that the range accuracy strongly depends on the number of received sub-bands and the spacing between them. For instance, using 1% of the total UWB bandwidth, an average range error of less than 10 cm is obtained. Furthermore, unlike conventional UWB receivers, the proposed technique performs better (in terms of range error) for low signal-to-noise ratios.