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Ultra-wideband channel estimation with application towards time-of-arrival estimation

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is the next viable solution for applications in wireless personal area network (WPAN), body area network (BAN) and wireless sensor network (WSN). However, as application evolves toward a more realistic situation, wideband channel characteristics such as pulse distortion must be accounted for in channel modeling. Furthermore, application-oriented services such as ranging and localization demand fast prototyping, real-time processing of measured data, and good low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance. Despite the tremendous effort being vested in devising new receivers by the global research community, channel-estimating Rake receiver is still one of the most promising receivers that can offer superior performance to the suboptimal counterparts. However, acquiring Nyquist-rate samples costs substantial power and resource consumption and is a major obstacle to the feasible implementation of the asymptotic maximum likelihood (ML) channel estimator.

In this thesis, we address all three aspects of the UWB impulse radio (UWB-IR), in three separate contributions. First, we study the {\it a priori} dependency of the CLEAN deconvolution with real-world measurements, and propose a high-resolution, multi-template deconvolution algorithm to enhance the channel estimation accuracy. This algorithm is shown to supersede its predecessors in terms of accuracy, energy capture and computational speed. Secondly, we propose a {\it regularized} least squares time-of-arrival (ToA) estimator with wavelet denoising to the problem of ranging and localization with UWB-IR. We devise a threshold selection framework based on the Neyman-Pearson (NP) criterion, and show the robustness of our algorithm by comparing with other ToA algorithms in both computer simulation and ranging measurements when advanced digital signal processing (DSP) is available. Finally, we propose a low-complexity ML (LC-ML) channel estimator to fully exploit the multipath diversity with Rake receiver with sub-Nyquist rate sampling. We derive the Cram\'er-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) for the LC-ML, and perform simulation to compare our estimator with both the $\ell_1$-norm minimization technique and the conventional ML estimator.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/1603
Date25 August 2009
CreatorsLiu, Ted C.-K.
ContributorsDong, Xiaodai
Source SetsUniversity of Victoria
LanguageEnglish, English
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
RightsAvailable to the World Wide Web

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