A UWB ranging method based on weighted energy detection

In order to design a low-computational Time Of Arrival (TOA) estimation algorithm for the Ultra WideBand (UWB) based wireless sensor network, a new TOA estimation method which focuses on the Direct Path (DP) component based on weighted energy detection is proposed in this paper. This method includes two steps, one is DP energy block detection, and the other is the refined DP estimation. A closed form for performance analysis is proposed, and system parameters that affect estimation performance are studied with analytical and numerical methods. The results compared with traditional ranging methods also show that this method can achieve relative high performance under low sample rate conditions.