Experimental evaluation of UWB ranging performance for correlation and ED receivers in dense multipath environment

UWB signal reception can be accomplished by coherent or non-coherent receivers. Correlation receiver is a type of coherent receiver while energy detection (ED) receiver belongs to non-coherent type. In this paper, we evaluate their ranging performance using the channel profiles measured in a typical indoor office environment. The effects of ranging parameters such as search window length are also investigated. The results show that correlation receiver outperforms ED receiver in the line-of-sight (LOS) scenario and smaller integration interval gives better performance for ED. For the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenario, surprisingly, ED receiver outperforms correlation receiver and larger integration interval brings better performance for ED when the detection threshold exceeds certain level. The study also shows that regardless of the receiver types used, the resultant ranging errors for the LOS or NLOS environments can be described by unified models with the parameters being distance dependent.