Time-of-arrival estimation in path attenuation

We consider a time-of-arrival (ToA) estimation in the presence of path attenuation. Maximum correlation (MC) is revisited and maximum likelihood (ML) is newly derived to estimate the ToA. It reveals that for low effective bandwidth, short distance and large path loss exponent, the ML has a smaller error variance than the MC. Numerical examples illustrate that the ML outperforms the MC.