TOA estimation in IR UWB ranging using rank statistics with energy detection receiver under harsh conditions

To improve time of arrival (TOA) estimation in impulse radio ultra wideband (IR UWB) ranging under harsh conditions, a novel method based on the rank statistics of the received signals is proposed to detect the first path (FP) in dense multipath, in which the FP is not always the strongest. Under the energy detection (ED) receiver, many threshold based methods are proposed for TOA estimation in the AWGN. However, many of them do not work well under harsh conditions, for example, when the noise is non-Gaussian or when there are outliers in the received signal. In these situations, there will be more random large samples in the output of the ED receiver, which will affect the FP detection, as it will be hard to model the received signal. The proposed method can solve the problem and it does not require prior information. Simulation results demonstrate its effectiveness.