Research on the IR-UWB Ranging Algorithm in Outdoor Near-Ground Environment

Impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) has been adopted in wireless sensor networks (WSN) research due to its high precision ranging and localization capability. Focus on the outdoor near-ground environment, the propagation characteristics of the IR-UWB signal is researched experimentally. A time-of arrival (TOA) ranging algorithm is proposed. Based on the matched filter (MF) receiver, the searching steps of the direct path (DP) component in the dense multipath are discussed. The Kalman filter is also used to improve the performance of the ranging estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to acquire accurate ranging results and well-suited for the WSN application in outdoor near-ground environment.