Joint estimation of TOA and DOA in IR-UWB system using a successive propagator method

Abstract

Impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) ranging and positioning require accurate estimation of time-of-arrival (TOA) and direction-of-arrival (DOA). With receiver of two antennas, both of the TOA and DOA parameters can be estimated via two-dimensional (2D) propagator method (PM), in which the 2D spectral peak searching, however, renders much higher computational complexity. This paper proposes a successive PM algorithm for joint TOA and DOA estimation in IR-UWB system to avoid 2D spectral peak searching. The proposed algorithm firstly gets the initial TOA estimates in the two antennas from the propagation matrix, then utilises successively one-dimensional (1D) local searches to achieve the estimation of TOAs in the two antennas, and finally obtains the DOA estimates via the difference in the TOAs between the two antennas. The proposed algorithm, which only requires 1D local searches, can avoid the high computational cost in 2D-PM algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm can obtain automatically paired parameters and has better joint TOA and DOA estimation performance than conventional PM algorithm, estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance techniques algorithm and matrix pencil algorithm. Meanwhile, it has very close parameter estimation to that of 2D-PM algorithm. We have also derived the mean square error of TOA and DOA estimation of the proposed algorithm and the Cramer-Rao bound of TOA and DOA estimation in this paper. The simulation results verify the usefulness of the proposed algorithm.