Preliminary study on noncooperative positioning using UWB impulse radio

Impulse radio ultra wideband (IR UWB) is a promising technology for positioning. Many papers about UWB positioning focus on cooperative target. The study considers UWB positioning for noncooperative target, which means that the target is passive and does not transmit signal. There are few papers in the literature on the field. Existing papers place great emphasis on positioning algorithms instead of time based ranging techniques. In addition, they do not pay much attention on the propagation characteristics of the IR UWB signal in the special usage scenario, which is different from that in cooperative positioning. In the study, we present our understanding on the field. First, we point the importance of TOA estimation in noncooperative positioning. Then, we propose a novel UWB channel to explore the signal propagation characteristics. It is a two-stage cascade multipath channel. In the simulation, energy detection receiver is used to estimate the TOA of the special direct path. © 2012 IEEE.