Joint Estimation of ToA and Data Symbols in UWB Communication in Presence of Impulsive Interference

Ultra-wide band (UWB) ranging requires precise estimation of time-of-arrival (ToA) of first path (FP) signal. In UWB communication, estimation of ToA is challenging in the presence of impulsive interference and multipath. Generally in literature, ToA is estimated using threshold crossing techniques. Although threshold based ToA methods are simple, optimal threshold value is hard to determine in practice. In this paper, we propose joint estimation of ToA and data symbols by exploiting the cluster-sparsity of the received UWB signal in the presence of impulsive interference. The proposed receiver structure enhances the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver output by mitigating the impulsive interference and barring inter-clusters noise accumulation. The proposed method is also free from any threshold, training, and optimization process. Robustness of the proposed algorithm is validated for standardized IEEE 802.15.4a channel models in the presence of both additive white Gaussian noise and impulsive interference.