Assessment of Direct Positioning for IR-UWB in IEEE 802.15.4a channels

This paper assesses the problem of localization in IR-UWB under realistic channel models for Direct Position Estimation (DPE) approaches. DPE schemes have been proposed for positioning and localization for well developed systems like GNSS, where it has been analytically proved that the Maximum-likelihood single-step estimator outperforms two-step procedures. The extension to wideband systems and less favorable scenarios like indoor UWB channels is less explored. We derive a DPE algorithm and analyze its performance against two-step TOA based localization for an IR-UWB system. Numerical results are provided for IEEE 802.15.4a channel model showing positioning performance of the two approaches and highlighting the tradeoffs.