Accurate and Efficient Range Estimation for IEEE 802.15.4z-Compliant UWB System

Releasing the IEEE 802.15.4z standard enhanced de-ployment of the Ultra- WideBand (UWB) system in many chipsets for various emerging secure location and proximity applications. Accurate and precise range estimation is necessary in such applications. This paper improves the range estimation between two UWB nodes using a two-way range estimation principle in both Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non-LOS (NLOS) channels. We provide a method based on the Maximum Likelihood principle to efficiently estimate the peak position of the first path in the estimated Channel Impulse Response (CIR) from the UWB packet. Our method works when there is an unknown phase offset in the CIR samples due to e.g., hardware nonidealities. The proposed method improves the standard deviation (STD) of range error by more than 1 order of magnitude with respect to the state-of-the-art technique, while only incurs an extra 4% computational complexity increase. Simulations show that with 40ppm of crystal offset between two devices, the STD of range error for our method is 3.5mm in the LOS channel. Furthermore, with Oppm of crystal offset between two devices, the STD of range error for our method is 0.5mm in the LOS channel simulation compared with 1.3mm in the LOS measurement setup.