CRBs for UWB Multipath Channel Estimation: Impact of the Overlapping Between the MPCs on MPC Gain and TOA Estimation

In this paper we study the impact of the overlapping between neighboring MPCs (multipath component) on the performance of channel estimation. We consider IR-UWB (impulse radio) signals, and the IEEE802.15.3a and IEEE802.15.4a UWB channel models. We show that for a pulse width (PW) sufficiently smaller than the average MPC rate of arrival (ROA) the probability to have more than three overlapping MPCs is relatively small. We derive the CRBs (Cramer Rao bound) for the joint estimation of the MPC gain and TOA (time of arrival) in the case of up to three overlapping MPCs. We compute also the average CRBs. We show that the CRBs obtained by averaging more than 80% of possible cases of the channel, are very close to the bounds obtained under the non-overlapping assumption (NOLA).