Experimental Validation of UWB CIR Estimation with VNA Measurements in Indoor Scenario

Accurate channel impulse response (CIR) obtained with low-cost methods is likely to be one of the key requirements for emerging sensing solutions. The approaches to obtain the CIR that are based on channel measurements with professional equipment are too expensive to be applied for the wide frequency bands, diverse environments and application scenarios. Currently, a viable solution to obtain the CIR is with ultra-wideband (UWB) technology and compliant commercial radio chips. Therefore, in this paper, the accuracy and reliability of the UWB CIR estimation and multipath component (MPC) detection in an indoor environment are experimentally validated with vector network analyzer (VNA) measurements. The results show a good alignment of the estimated CIRs with those acquired from VNA measurements and confirm that UWB is a promising low-cost alternative. The accuracy can be further improved with methods for aligning the first peaks of multiple CIR estimates.