Time-of-Arrival Estimation in the Presence of Narrow and Wide Bandwidth Interference in UWB Channels

Ultrawide bandwidth (UWB) positioning techniques have gained significant interest in recent years especially for cluttered environments where signals from satellite navigation systems are not reliable. Range measurements required by UWB positioning systems are usually obtained from the time-of-arrival (ToA) estimation of the first path, which could be a challenging task in the presence of multipath and interference. This paper proposes a practical ToA estimator to mitigate both narrowband and wideband interference. The performance of this estimator is compared with various other ToA estimators for UWB ranging systems. The effect of the interference is evaluated for different system parameters configurations in realistic multipath environments. For the case of simple ToA estimator based on thresholding with averaging filter, we provide a criteria to determine the suitable threshold level when narrowband interference (NBI) is present.