DOA Estimation for UWB Time Hopping Impulse Radio Multiple Access System

This paper addresses the problem of estimating the direction of arrival (DOA) of UWB impulse radio in the presence of multipath and co-channel interference. The system under consideration employs time hopping multiple access format propagating in an indoor dense multipath and in the presence of narrowband interference. The proposed approach includes an antenna array, analog subsystem providing the detection of the leading edge of the direct path and digital signal processing that estimates the DOA from the detected leading edges in the frequency domain. The approach requires neither very large bandwidth and dynamic range down conversion nor high speed analog to digital conversion (ADC) circuitry. The processing introduced is relatively simple as it processes small amount of data from low sampling rate ADC. Computer simulations illustrate that the proposed approach is highly robust against multipath as well as narrowband interference and effectively estimates the DOA in multi-user environment.