Ultra-wideband testbed for reduced data-rates and location

This work presents an UWB testbed for reduced data rates with capabilities of measuring range and location. The transmitter uses time hopping spread spectrum codes to reduce the peak to average ratio in the power spectral density. The pulse generator is based on a class-S digital pulse amplifier and a step recover diode circuit. The antenna subsystem is based on a bow-tie topology. The approach for the receiver is based on a filter bank reducing the complexity of the traditional RAKE receiver. Normalized minimum variance algorithm is proposed for estimating time of arrival exploiting the pulse train defined in the impulse radio transmission. Positioning estimation is tackled with the extended Kalman filter with TOA bias tracking allowing high accuracy even in non line of sight scenarios.