Performance Evaluation of TOA Estimation for Ultra-wideband System under AWGN and IEEE 802.13a Channel Model

This paper proposes the performance evaluation of seven Time-of-Arrival (TOA) estimation techniques in Ultra-wideband (UWB) systems. The TOA estimation schemes can be classified 2 types such as one-step and two-step TOA estimation. One-step TOA estimations include the maximum energy selection (MES) and the maximum energy selection based-on block (MES -- Block). For two-step TOA estimations, we consider 3 techniques including the separated signal TOA estimations that have 3 types: 1 Cut, 2 Cut and 3 Cut, the threshold-based TOA estimation and the window-based TOA estimation. Additional, we consider three UWB pulses that have power spectral density comply with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mask. Moreover, we consider two environment types that are Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel and UWB channel model based-on IEEE 802.13a (CM2). We use the root mean square error (RMSE) for evaluating and comparing the performance of TOA estimation schemes. The simulation results show that the window-based TOA estimation outperforms than other methods under both channel models. The threshold-based TOA estimation is very sensitive to multipath channel because its performance rapidly decreases when these techniques are applied on UWB channel model.