Effect of CDMA Schemes on UWB Time-of-Arrival Estimation

The presence of multiuser interference (MUI) can seriously impact the accuracy of ultra-wideband (UWB) time delay estimation. This is especially true for the probability of an early false alarm error, which is strongly affected by the peak-to-average ratio (PAR) of the MUI signal. The averaging process used to achieve processing gain can affect the PAR of MUI differently in different multiple access scenarios. In this paper, we examine the effect of CDMA schemes on UWB time-of-arrival estimation performance; we do this by evaluating the PAR of MUI, both semi-analytically and experimentally, for time-hopped and direct sequence multiple access scenarios.