A Superior Iterative Transmitted-Reference Pulse Cluster Ultra-Wideband System for Ranging and Communication

Ultra-wideband (UWB) signals penetrate obstacles, achieve centimeter-level ranging accuracy, and provide low-SNR communication. These features make UWB technology a good candidate for applications demanding accurate ranging and low-power communication. Iterative transmitted-reference pulse cluster (ITRPC) UWB system increases the data rate, the power efficiency, and the accuracy of the time-of-arrival (ToA) estimation compared to the conventional
transmitted-reference pulse cluster system. Among the ranging techniques, ToA or its simpler version time-difference-of-arrival scheme can perfectly exploit the ultra-wide bandwidth of UWB signals to attain centimeter-level ranging accuracy. Hence, this paper considers ToA estimation for ranging. This paper proposes a novel ITRPC system that significantly outperforms the existing one. Simulation results show that the proposed analog ITRPC receiver improves the ToA estimation by about 6 dB and enhances the symbol detection by about 1:5 dB. Moreover,
an accurate analysis is developed to calculate the bit-error probability of the proposed ITRPC receiver in the presence of noise and monobit quantization. To the best of our knowledge, accurate analysis of a data-aided pilot recovery system has not yet been reported in the literature. The
paper also covers some points for implementing and theoretical analysis of the proposed system.