Ultra-wideband technology-based ranging platform with real-time signal processing

The ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is recognized as an ideal candidate to provide accurate localization in challenging indoor environments where other technologies, e.g. WiFi or ZigBee cannot yield good accuracy due to their signal bandwidth limitation. The energy detection receiver is currently one of the most promising low complexity non-coherent architectures that neither requires high sampling rates nor information about the channel. Despite a vast body of research on UWB ranging and localization, relatively little knowledge is available regarding practical implementations of the proposed ideas. Although there are some testbeds already proposed and built, most of them imply a sort of correlation and require very high sampling rates (in the order of several GS/s) which are still difficult to realize in hardware. Moreover, the majority of the platforms does not support visualization of results in real-time. In this paper, a UWB-based ranging platform with real-time signal processing is presented. It is based on the time-of-arrival (ToA) technique and relatively simple to implement non-coherent energy detection (ED) receiver architecture. Our first measurement results indicate that it is possible to achieve ranging accuracy of 1–3 cm with the sampling rate of 1 GS/s and with max. 3 bits of the A/D resolution.