Position Estimation for IR-UWB Systems

Abstract

IR-UWB has emerged as a promising candidate for positioning passive nodes in wireless networks due to its extremely short time domain transmitted pulses. The two-step approaches in which first different TOAs are estimated and then fed into a triangulation procedure are suboptimal in general. This is because in the first stage of these methods, the measurements at distinct anchors are independent and ignore the constraint that all measurements must be consistent with a single emitter location. In this chapter, the authors investigate two techniques to overcome this issue. First, a two-step procedure based on multi-TOA estimation is proposed. Second, a positioning approach omitting the intermediate known as DPE is presented. Complementarily, the authors explore the CS-based modeling of both approaches so that the temporal sparsity of the UWB received signal and the consequent sparseness of the discrete spatial domain are exploited to select the most significant TOAs and to reduce the amount of information to be sent to a central fusion unit in the DPE approach.