The main purpose of this thesis is to estimate the signal arrival time in low rate wireless personal area network systems. In a dense multipath environment, the generalized maximum-likelihood (GML) algorithm can be used for the time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation. Nevertheless, the GML algorithm is very time-consuming and usually takes a long period of time, and sometimes fails to converge. Hence, a simplified scheme that would improve the algorithm is investigated. In the simplified scheme, the search is executed in a sequential form. Two threshold parameters are determined for the stop condition in the algorithm. One threshold is on the arrival time of estimated path, while the other is on the fading amplitude of estimated path. The determination of thresholds can be based on the minimum error probability, which is defined as the sum of the false alarm probability and the missing probability. Root-mean-square error statistics are used to improve the thresholds setting. In this scheme, candidate pairs of thresholds are evaluated in each appropriate range. To solve the problem that the root-mean-square error value for each pair of thresholds is calculated, the simulated annealing is adopted for searching the best threshold pair. The problem that all possible solutions in a large range must be evaluated can be solved by simulated annealing. From the simulation results, it is seen that, while the signal-to-noise ratio is larger or equal to 4dB, the proposed scheme can achieve better performance than the root-mean-square error statistics scheme.