Estimation of time of arrival of UWB multipath clusters through a spatial correlation technique

This study estimates the time of arrival (TOA) of ultra wideband multipath components (MPCs) by analysing the spatial correlation of multipath signals captured by a 7times7 antenna array. In this study, both line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight radio propagation paths were considered. Each power-delay profile bin from all the array positions was used to calculate the spatial correlation between itself and the adjacent receiving point bins. Consequently, some MPC time delays and clusters, associated with high correlation values, were selected and compared with the TOA computed by the Sensor-CLEAN algorithm. A close agreement of the TOA estimated by both techniques was obtained. Finally, multipath cluster distributions and clustering model parameters are presented and compared with previously published results