Time delay estimation for UWB non coherent receiver in indoor environment, from theory to practice

Extracting parameter estimates from noisy observations of an underlying signal is a common problem in many fields. Time delay estimation (TDE) is essential for many areas, such as localization, array processing, and radar. The performance of any estimator is often evaluated via the mean square error (MSE) that can then be compared to analytical MSE lower bounds. In this paper, we first analyze a maximum likelihood (ML) estimator based on the knowledge of noisy second order statistics of the channel. We investigate lower bounds for the time delay estimation error for ultra-wideband ranging systems operating in realistic multipath environments. Based on the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB), we derive analytically a lower bound of the time delay estimation calculated using the Karhunen–Loève decomposition of the estimated channel autocorrelation matrix. Also, we investigate the practical implementation (based on energy detection) of the time delay estimator. In the second part of the paper, we have analyzed the time delay estimation performances with the energy maximization receiver. Simulations are evaluated using a simulated UWB underground mine channel. This can be considered as the first step for a global positioning system for use mining industry